Desi 'open source' software a big hit

Open source software is breeding entrepreneurships worldwide. Playing a key role in this blooming industry are several Indian developers. With their open source software solutions, these developers are taking computing to millions of people across the country and globally.

In fact, many of these have emerged as best with names like Hindawi, Zmanda and Dhvani or KDE Hindi. These products are helping an entire new generation of software developers.

Hindawi (hindawi.in) is a multilingual programming language tool that allows users to write computer programmes in languages other than English. In other words, Hindawi breaks the English language barrier and lets users do programming in their mother tongue.

These include equivalents of C, C++, lex, yacc, assembly, BASIC, LOGO etc in Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Assamese and other Indian languages.

These languages are called Hindi C or Hindi assembly or Bangla C or Bangla assembly etc for common understanding. They even have different names; such as, the equivalent programming language of C in Indian languages is Shaili Guru, Indic C++ is Shaili Shraeni, Indic yacc is Shaili Vyaakaran and so on.

However, these languages are syntax-compatible with their traditional English counterparts and can, therefore, utilise the existing libraries such as glibc etc. In a manner similar to the way C++ is syntax compatible to C and hence can use most of the C libraries.

WANem
WANem is a Wide Area Network Emulator, meant to provide a real experience of a Wide Area Network/Internet, during application development/testing over a LAN environment.

Typically application developers develop applications on a LAN while the intended purpose for the same could be, clients accessing the same over the WAN or even the Internet.

WANem thus allows the application development team to setup a transparent application gateway which can be used to simulate WAN characteristics like Network delay, Packet loss, Packet corruption, Disconnections, Packet re-ordering, Jitter, etc.

WANem was developed by three software professionals Manoj Nambiar, Hemanta Kumar Kalita and Debadatta Mishra all from India's largest IT company TCS.

The software was built to provide WAN access to the entire team since other WAN emulators were hardware-based, expensive and available to only a select few in test labs.

Zmanda Recovery Manager
Zmanda is an open source backup and recovery solution. Zmanda Recovery Manager aims to simplify the life of a database administrator with a simple-to-use yet robust recovery manager for the MySQL Server. It is a perl-based utility.

With ZRM for MySQL, network adminstrators can schedule full and incremental backups of their MySQL database. And also start immediate backup or postpone scheduled backups based on defined thresholds.

Network administrators can choose to do more flexible, logical or faster raw backups of their database, backup remote MySQL database through a firewall, get email notification about the status of backups and receive MySQL backup reports via RSS feeds and monitor and browse backups.

They can even define retention policies and delete expired backups, recover a database easily to any point in time or to any particular transaction, eg just before a user made an error.

Zamanda was founded by Chander Kant who is the company's CEO. A Masters in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BS in Computer Science from the IIT, Kanpur, Kant was named one of the "Top 20 Linux Luminaries" by Linux World Magazine in 2004.

Dhvani
Dhvani is text-to-speech system for Indian languages. It is a framework to develop Indian Language text to speech system. It can serve as a backend for speech synthesisers in Indian Languages, in conjunction with a language-specific text-to-phonetics module.

The software uses images in conjunction with voice output in local languages to make the computing device accessible to a larger section of the Indian population.

Currently, Dhvani has a phonetics-to-speech engine which is capable of generating intelligible speech from a suitable phonetic description in any Indian language. In addition, it is capable of converting UTF-8 text in Hindi and Kannada to this phonetic description, and then speaking it out using the Phonetics-to-Speech engine.

Current C- GNU/Linux implementation supports Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Gujarati, Bengali, Telugu, Punjabi, Tamil and Oriya. The project was started by Simputer project head Dr Ramesh Hariharan, IISc, Bengaluru.

MayaVi2
MayaVi is an open source tool that allows easy and interactive three-dimensional visualisation of data. It is written in Python and uses the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) for the graphics.

In 2000, Prabhu Ramachandran, then an IIT Madras aerospace engineering student, started work on the MayaVi project with his colleagues to visualise computational fluid dynamics data.

"Popular tools available for the purpose at that time were proprietary and prohibitively expensive," noted the Linux For You magazine, published from Delhi, which has announced its FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) India Awards for those involved in a "saga of innovation".

MayaVi is a scientific data visualiser. It is written in Python and uses the Visualisation Toolkit (VTK) for visualisation.

MayaVi2, the next generation of MayaVi, is currently under development.

JTrac
JTrac is a customisable issue-tracking Web-application written in Java. JTrac can be installed in a few minutes without having to type any commands.

Designed to be generic, users can customise fields to track items (like bugs) and allocate tasks etc. It's a lightweight J2EE application built on the Spring Framework.

It has support for file-attachments and email integration. JTrac also offers customisation options, especially in the areas of workflow and field-level permissions and compares well to even commercial tools.

TuxType
Another from the Indian winners is TuxType which five students of the Government Engineering College at Thrissur built Unicode Malayalam support.

It is an educational typing tutor for children. It features several different types of gameplay, at a variety of difficulty levels.

TuxType (tuxtype.sourceforge.net) became the first FOSS typing tutor to bundle Unicode support for Indian languages at a time when Indian language solutions in computing were eagerly awaited.

TuxTyping is an educational typing tutorial game featuring Tux, the Linux Penguin. The player guides Tux to eat fish which are falling from the top of the screen. The game is intended for children learning to type. Also, it has higher difficulty levels which even experienced typists may find challenging.

DeepOfix
DeepOfix features claim to be one of the quickest and simplest operating system installers written for Dhvani. According to the software developer, users don't need to have any prior experience on GNU/Linux for this. A user can complete the server installation with just 15 simple questions and within 25 minutes.

DeepOfix is one of the few GNU/Linux operating systems to ship with built-in and pre-integrated support for LDAP.

LDAP support in DeepOfix goes beyond installation -- in DeepOfix LDAP is not just installed, but also configured as the default store for user account data and password information.

Source: Times of India