The Hindu Business Line : Bengal plans Open Source Software Development Centre

Kolkata June 8 The IT Department of West Bengal has planned to set up a centre for Open Source Software Development and Training. A budgetary allocation of Rs 2 crore has already been made for the purpose, Dr Debesh Das, West Bengal's Minister for Information Technology, said at a seminar on `Open Document Format & Service Oriented Architecture' organised here by CII (Eastern Region) on Friday.

Dr Das said the proposed centre would be engaged in development and training in open source software. School and college teachers, and government employees would be trained with a view to making them conversant with open source software and platforms.

The State Government's e-governance programmes would be focussed on deployment of software that run on open source platforms. Tenders for the proposed chip design centre here would be floated soon, he said.

Open Document Format is an ISO-approved standard and is fast-emerging, as an open standard to facilitate interoperability and collaboration in the format for editing of documents, interchange, storage and retrieval in many countries.

Among those who attended the seminar were representatives of Free Software Foundation and IBM India.

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