Open-Source convention concludes in Delhi

• Email
• Print
• ( 0 )
• 

Speakers identify 20 key challenges for OSS community to address.

Amidst healthy and vigorous debate, the three day LinuxAsia 2007 convention concluded today, with speakers from different segments and stakeholders of the open source community including industry, government and the developer community highlighting the 20 key challenges that threshold economies like India face.

Commercial or business interests of vendors are not necessarily contrary to the concept of "societal benefit" as espoused by the OSS proponents. This formed the theme of the overall deliberations at the various sessions at the convention.

The analysis was summed up in a presentation from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the knowledge partners to the event. Cdr. Deepak Uppal (retd), principal consultant at PWC said, "Overall, we have identified 20 challenge areas for ICT using Open Source technologies. But what is more important is to challenge the OSS community to produce solutions that can help bridge the gaps in physical infrastructure."

He said that tho

se regions that have not managed to better their physical infrastructure, such as Ladakh or the North-East, could they be brought on par with the highly urbanized regions suing solutions ICT solutions. In other words, he said, "Can we see OSS solutions making geography history."

The twenty challenges identified were in areas related to technology, standards and regulation, finance management, infrastructure and usage. Among the challenges were interoperability of devices and networks, building devices that are robust and designed for rural conditions, managing change and obsolescence of technologies, security issues, aligning government regulations with new technologies, standards for multilingual storage of content, lack of realistic financial models for project management, low penetration geographically, low penetration demographically, power supply, cost of ICT, high bandwidth and transmission costs, exclusion of segments of the population, lack of education and skills, and