The Hindu Business Line : Linux conference gets under way in Bangalore

THE annual free and open source software (FOSS) event, Linux Bangalore/2004 got underway here today. The three-day conference from December 1-3 will feature speakers from the Indian industry as also from the US, Europe and Australia.

Conference topics would cover diverse spectrum of FOSS related technologies and projects including the KDE desktop project and the IndLinux Project.

HP, the platinum sponsor of the event, reaffirmed its commitment to the Linux space by showcasing its strategy for the Open Source community in India. The company's Linux Strategy focuses on open systems, open standard and low cost industry-standard platforms.

"HP has already contributed and will continue to contribute key technologies to the Open Source community. We have had great success worldwide in the Open Source arena," said Mr Faisal M. Paul, Country Manager, High Performance Computing & Linux, Hewlett-Packard India Sales Pvt Ltd.

In his presentation on `bringing benefits of the Open Source Software process to enterprise software development', Mr Brian Behlendorf of Collab.net said HP had close to 6,000 engineers working internally on open source projects.

According to Mr Behlendorf, companies such as IBM, HP and Dresdner have shown interest in the Open Source movement and are collaborating with the Open Source communities to address issues such as security, quality assurance and testing on applications and coding related to open source.

On a query if the open source movement would spell the death of commercial software, "there would always be commercial software... I don't think there will ever be a day when there won't be proprietary software," he said.

Mr Behlendorf is the Founder of the Apache Software Foundation. Apache is reportedly the world's most popular free web server package.