Engagements - Kochi   

State to roll out ‘Fosster’ soon

KOCHI: The State government will soon roll out the ‘Fosster’ (Free and Open Source Software Training Entrepreneurship and Research) programme in engineering colleges in the State to promote the use of free and open source software among the student community. Fifty projects on the software would receive an assistance of Rs.50,000 each from the government.

The funds would be released during the 2010-11 academic year, Ajay Kumar, State IT Secretary, said. In his inaugural address at a national conference on ‘Role of open source software in libraries’ organised by the Cochin University of Science and Technology library here on Tuesday, Mr. Kumar said the projects would be selected by a mentor in the free and open source software community. It would be similar to Google’s “Summer of Code” programme, where student developers were offered stipend to write code for various open source software projects. Mr. Kumar said the programme would be launched in engineering colleges in the first phase.

It would be later extended to other colleges. Fosster is part of the ongoing efforts being made by the government to promote the use of free and open source software in the State. Elaborating on other such programmes, the IT Secretary said the government had taken a policy decision to migrate all its web sites into the open source content framework. He said the free software would enable the departments and users to upload, share and modify the content.

Mr. Kumar said the free and open source software had also been used for the Malayalam lexicon and ‘Ente gramam’ projects.

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