...the number of Indian contributors in the open source software (OSS) world is disproportionately low, due in part to a lack of proper mentoring....

[Frederick Noronha (FN)]

http://business.newsforge.com/business/06/05/18/1459236.shtml?tid-35

Education/Training
Interview: Red Hat's open source scholarship challenge
Friday May 26, 2006 (08:01 AM GMT)
By: Mayank Sharma

There is no dearth of IT talent in India, but for a country that churns
out thousands of IT students every year, the number of Indian
contributors in the open source software (OSS) world is
disproportionately low, due in part to a lack of proper mentoring. To
encourage more students to go into OSS development, the Kanwal Rekhi
School of Information Technology (KReSIT) at the Indian Institute of
Technology Bombay partners with Red Hat for an open source scholarship
challenge each year. Participants, mentored by OSS leaders, get the
opportunity to work and collaborate to solve a real-world problem, and
the winners get a share of the Rs. 10 lakh (about $22,000) prize. In an
email interview, Venkatesh Hariharan, head of Open Source Affairs at Red
Hat India and coordinator of the challenge, provides details about the
event.

NewsForge: Please share some history of the event.

Venkatesh Hariharan: The program has its roots in a discussion that [Red
Hat CEO and President] Matthew Szulik had with Dr. D. B. Phatak, founder
of KReSIT, during his first visit to India in 2003. The common objective
was to encourage Indian students to contribute to the global open source
community and make them familiar with the open source philosophy of
community, collaboration, and shared ownership of intellectual
resources.

NF: What separates Red Hat's open source scholarship program from other
such events in India, such as Google Code Jam? Does Red Hat conduct
similar events elsewhere as well?

VH: With the Red Hat Scholarships, the idea is to tap into the software
development projects that students do every year as part of their
academic requirements and channel them into the open source community.
We also aim to connect them to mentors from the open source community.
This helps them work on meaningful, real-life projects and contribute to
society. We will also be doing chat sessions on technical issues like
application development on Linux and Java programming, so that their
knowledge is enhanced.

This is the first time that Red Hat is doing such a program of this
nature anywhere in the world. In the first two years, we started with
India because this is a vast geography to cover. The third year's
program has been expanded to the Indian subcontinent, and we have
received project submissions from Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and more.

NF: Do you encourage students to contribute to existing projects or make
their own? Aren't the challenges listed a little vague?

VH: The choice of projects is left to the students, and we merely make
suggestions. Many students request our help in selecting projects every
year, and therefore we suggest broad topics and also list open source
projects that are looking for volunteers.

NF: What happens to the projects after the competition is over? Who
maintains the software? What's the current status of the projects cooked
up by previous winners?

VH: We request participants of the previous year's projects become
mentors for the next year so that the development work continues. One of
the prize-winning teams developed a college information system and set
up a company to commercialize it. We ask that the projects be hosted on
community Web sites like SourceForge or Sarovar.org and request the
project teams to mentor next year's teams.

NF: How is the event conducted? Is everything done over the Web, or do
the judges interact with the participants in person at some stage?

VH: Given the fact that there are 1,750 engineering colleges and 300,000
students, reaching out to the students is a challenge. Fortunately, the
Web allows us a scalable way of doing this in the form of chat sessions
and discussion groups at the collaborative portal.

NF: In the scholarship rules under "Support For Contestants," you talk
of providing online support and download sites for tools and software
programs. What are these?

VH: We want to familiarize the students with open source platforms and
development tools like Fedora, Eclipse, and JBoss.

NF: Why does Red Hat take it upon itself to decide the license for the
code? What happens if a student decides on a particular license? Is he
at any disadvantage?

VH: We are changing this so that the students can decide the license
they want. We recommend the General Public License (GPL), but they are
free to select any license approved by the Open Source Initiative.