GROW Workshop: OSS Essential Training Program @ IIT, University of Dhaka

Two days GROW Workshop: Open Source Software Essential Training Program was held at Institute of Information Technology, University of Dhaka on April 24 – 25, 2009.

Please visit to know more about GROW.

GROW

BDOSDN is renamed as GROW. GROW is a recursive acronym of Grow Opensource Willingness. However, the objectives and organization remain the same with a different name.

BDOSDN Workshop: OSS Essential Training Program

Two days BDOSDN Workshop: Open Source Software Essential Training Program is going to be held at Chittagong University of Engineering & Technology (CUET) on February 22 – 23, 2008, in association with CSE Association, CUET and sponsored by Chittagong Skills Development Center (CSDC).

Experts in open source technologies from industry and academia will deliver lectures and hands-on training on open source philosophy, licensing & copyright issues, operating platform and different development tools & technologies. Young Bangladeshi entrepreneurs from jhoroTEK, an OSS based software firm, will share their experiences in the workshop. Also ‘Peace War’ by EternityGAME-HOUSE, an OSS based game, will be presented.

Please visit BDOSDN website to know more about BDOSDN.

Bangla digit recognition OCR has been uploaded into Sourceforge.net

Source codes and related screenshots and documentation of Bangla digit recognition OCR has been uploaded into https://sourceforge.net/projects/open-bangla-ocr/ under MIT license.

This OCR had been developed using MATLAB in Windows environment. Interested people can go to the link above and download the source codes. To run the program you have to open "start.m" under "test" folder by MATLAB and simply run.

BDOSDN express gratitude to Syed Monowar Hossain and Amin Ahsan Ali, who developed this system in 2003 as a project in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Dhaka and shared their creation with open source practitioners through BDOSDN.

Interested people to join Open Bangla OCR development project are requested to come forward and may discuss in BDOSDN yahoogroup.

Eternity Game House presents BDOSDN 3D game

Recently Eternity Game House bestows a 3D game named "Peace War" to Bangladesh Open Source Development Network. Founder of Eternity Game House Syed Jafar S Mahmood stated that the game would attract game lovers and encourage gamers to use OSS(Open Source Software) and develop the game.
'Peace War' is a first person shooter game. The game portrays how a Bangladesh Army man carries duties jeoparding his life to establish peace and tranquility in UN Peace-keeping Mission. The participant of the game is to be the winner to raise country's honour and dignity. Main menu of the game is in Bengali. The game is developed using Eternity DarkGame Technology.
In order to run the game the PC should have the following configuration:
64 MB RAM, Intel Pentium 2 or AMD processor, DirectX 7, at least 20 MB free Hard Disk space. The demo version is available in the following link:

http://eternity.freeweb7.com/index.html
BDOSDN Founder Tazrian Khan, Co-Founder SM Ashraful Kadir thank Eternity Game House for this initiative and call upon to develop such Open Source game in the near future. Coordinator of BDOSDN Arup Barua announced that full version of the game would be released soon over internet side by side source code would also be available for open source developers. He reiterated that BDOSDN would take effective programmes like open source workshop/seminar/symposium to encourage open source development and build a open source community.
visit BDOSDN group for more details: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bdosdn/

The news is also available in the daily Ittefaq, a renowned Bangla Newspaper.
Here is the link: http://www.ittefaq.com/get.php?d=07/10/29/w/n_zrkkqq

In Search of an Open Source Business Model

The former head of Oracle apps and new CEO of an open source ERP vendor shares his tips for developing a successful open source business model - By Don Klaiss, Compiere.

Available in: http://www.sandhill.com/opinion/editorial.php?id=144

Presentation: Business with Open Source Software - How to do business with Free Software?

You can download the presentation (OSS Business Concepts.ppt) from
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bdosdn/files/Seminar20070721/

Or you can read below ...

Business with Open Source Software: How to do business with Free Software?

Presented by
SM Ashraful Kadir
Co-founder, BDOSDN
Senior Application Engineer, IT, Banglalink

Saturday July 21, 2007

Seminar organized by
Bangladesh Open Source Developers Network (BDOSDN)
IT Bangla Pvt. Ltd.
Dhaka, Bangladesh

***

Opportunities for Open Source Software Business in Bangladesh?
- Windows, Office are not the only software, large to small businesses need lot more software to run their business… e.g. ERP, CRM, Accounting, HRM and many more

- Research through internet for available open source solutions for possible niche markets… large and commodity software markets are taken by Microsoft, Red Hat, Oracle, Sun, HP… or will be taken soon

- Download the source code, you may need small modification, make your marketing plan… sell it at low price
- Offer pre-sales & post-sales supports, trainings… of course, not for free
- Open Source + Proprietary… Choose a hybrid business model for your business


Utilization of community resources will reduce production cost

















The Open Source Effect in Software Business

















From “Doing Business With Open Source” by Aaron Weiss

- “Increasingly, software vendors are developing products ranging from messaging servers to CRM platforms and releasing at least entry-level feature sets as free, open source code”

- “For the small business, this means expanding choices in free, commercial-grade software. Although the basic software is free and may be all you ever need, prepare to pay up for support, hosting, premium features or the development cost of customizing the source code to your own unique needs.”

- Few types of available open source business software:
Customer Relations Management (CRM), Procurement, Office Productivity, Accounting

Source: http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com/news/article.php/3679161


Four Ways To Win

Investor's point of view, at least four known business models for making money with open source:
1. Support Sellers: give away the software product, but sell distribution, branding, and after-sale service. e.g. Red Hat
2. Loss Leader: give away open-source as a loss-leader and market positioner for closed software. e.g. Netscape
3. Widget Frosting: a hardware company goes open-source in order to get better drivers and interface tools cheaper. e.g. Silicon Graphics
4. Accessorizing: selling books, offering trainings

Source: http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/case_for_business.php

Presentation: OSS and OSS Ecosystem

You can download the presentation (OSS and OSS Ecosystem.ppt) from
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bdosdn/files/Seminar20070721/

Or you can read below ...

Open Source and Open Source Ecosystem

Presented by
Tazrian Khan
Founder, BDOSDN
Senior Applications Engineer, IT, Banglalink

Saturday July 21, 2007

Seminar organized by
BDOSDN and IT Bangla Ltd.
Dhaka, Bangladesh

***

What is Open Source Software (OSS)?
- Source code is free/available
- Source code can be modified and improve
- Source code can be distributed

OSS code is free which relates to freedom, but NOT free of cost


Open Source Ecosystem















Where does Open Source Software Come From?
- Enterprises are large contributors
  - Employ individual developers
  - Contribute code
  - Participate in consortia
- Vendors are also deeply involved
  - Use OSS as a competitive weapon
  - Collaborate with OSS projects to lower costs
  - Offer OSS as an entry-level product for other products
  - Participate in consortia to share development costs and build standards

A misconception that OSS software comes solely from hobbyists working in their spare time


Open Source and Bangladesh – Why?
- Bridge technological divide
- Cost minimization
- Customization and localization
- OSS is a viable alternative to pirated software
- Contribute in producer side
- ICT4D


Open Source for Users – Why?
- Reliability, Performance, etc.
- License relief
- Platform flexibility
- Cheap
- Source code control, support resources, customization, leverage


Myths about Open Source
- Open source is free
- No quality control in free software
- No product direction
- No support/ lack of support
- No business opportunities


Open Source Software Repositories
- Kernel.org
- SourceForge.net
- Freshmeat.net


Internet and Open Source
- The Internet as a development environment
- capturing spare cycles
- massively parallel development
- The Internet as a Marketing/Distribution environment
- reducing friction & inertia
- eliminating distribution costs


Current Uses of Open Source Software
- Internet: HTTP, Mail, DNS, IP, Routing, etc.
- Appliances & Embedded Applications
- File & Print (SAMBA)
- Development tools (GCC)
- Office Applications (OpenOffice)
- Games


Conclusion
OSS are viable alternative specially for developing countries like Bangladesh in terms of cost effectiveness and technology advancement

OSS Seminar: News [Bangla]

http://www.prothom-alo.com/mcat.news.details.php?nid=NTA4MTM=&mid=MTE=

Presenation: Concurrent Versions System (CVS)

Find ppt version (CVSDemo.ppt) in http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bdosdn/files/Seminar20070721/

or read below...


Concurrent Versions System
Presented by:
K. M. Fazle Azim
Member, BDOSDN
fazle_azim@centionsoftware.com

Presented in:
OSS Seminar organized by BDOSDN and IT Bangla Ltd. (Dhaka, Bangladesh, 21 July 2007)


What is a “Versioning System”?
- Record the history of files
- Share code within a group
- Have multiple people edit the same files
- Merge changes from different people
- Go back in time

The Dark Ages
- Saving every version of every file you have ever created.
- Saving current state of project every so often
- This would however waste an enormous amount of disk space.
- People would have to communicate to make sure only one person was editing at a time.

But now CVS in action ...
- CVS allow you to:
 - store and retrieve multiple versions of a file
 - Compare different versions of a file
 - Perform parallel development

- Not just for code:
 - Documentation
 - Config files
 - Etc

Terminology
- Repository
 - Where the source code management system stores its copy of your file

- Sandbox
 - Your personal working copy
 - You make your changes and then put it back in the repository

- Check out / check in
 - You check files out of the repository (into the sandbox)
 - Edit them
 - Check them back into the repository

- Branch
 - Separate development path
 - V1.0 of your program has been released
 - Now you work on v2.0 as a new branch
 - A bug has been found in v1.0 so you make a bug fix and have v1.1

- Merge
 - Eventually, v1.1 has to be merged back into main line of development, into v2.0

DEMO

What we are going to do
- Create a repository
- Put some files into repository
- Check out the files and edit them
 - Insert keyword substitution for documentation
 - Check it back into the repository

cvs command syntax
- Cvs [cvs-options] command [command-options] [command-args]
 - Cvs-options  are for the CVS system itself.
 - The command options and command args are for the subcommand only

Creating a Repository
- Initialize the value of CVSROOT
 - $export CVSROOT=/var/cvs
 - OR
 - $export CVSROOT=:ext:babu@cvs.cention.se:/var/cvs
 - $export  CVS_RSH=ssh

- Run cvs init:
- $cvs init

Putting stuff into the repository to get started
- Have a directory NOT in the repository
- with all your files you want to start with.
- cd into that directory:
- $cd  /home/babu/workDir

CVS Import
- $cvs import project-name vendor-tag release-tag
- Vendor-tag
 - Track 3rd party code, usually not needed
- Release-tag
 - Current revision of vendor branch files

Import example
- cvs import is a good way to bootstrap a bunch of files into a new project
- $cvs import myProject  start sample

Creating a New Sandbox
- cvs checkout project-name
- $cvs checkout myProject
 - Directory myProject  now created in your sandbox and it contains all the files in the myProject directory in the repository

- Now, you can cd to myProject  of sandbox and edit, etc.

Checkin
- The checkin command in CVS is “commit”
- cvs commit [filename1 filename2]
 - Will update repository for the named files
 - If no files named, updates all file changes in the
 - sandbox to the repository

- Note - the repository is not changed until the commit is requested, no matter how much editing you do, so don’t forget to end your session with a commit

To check out a single file
- cvs update [file1 file2 …]
 - Downloads changes from repository to an existing sandbox
 - Merges changes from repository into changed files in the sandbox
 - If no files names, do all files in project

Status and Log
- cvs status [files …]
 - Status of ifles such as current working version and version in the repository

- cvs log [files …]
 - Displays a log regarding files in the current sandbox

Remove a Repository and Release a Sandbox
- cvs remove files
 - Removes files structure from repository

- cvs release [-d] files
 - Releases [-d and removes] the sandbox files

Hello, GTK+/Gnome Application Development

Interested in GTK+/Gnome Application Development?

Let's start... http://developer.gnome.org/doc/GGAD/

I have just written my Hello, World program.

BDOSDN - IT Bangla OSS Seminar

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bdosdn/message/71

Details Schedule:

Date: 21 July, 2007 Saturday
Time: 2:30 - 5:00 PM

Venue:

IT Bangla Ltd
32, Topkhana Road
Chattagram Bhaban (3rd Floor)
Dhaka-1000, Bangladesh
Phone # 880-2-9557053, 9558519, 9553937
e-mail : education@itbangla.net

Programme:

2:30 PM : Opening session, Distribution of Documentation CDs, Course Materials
2:35 PM : Introduction to Open Source and Open Source Ecosystem
3:05 PM : Open Office and other Open Source Software installation
3:30 PM : Introduction to Concurrent Versioning System (CVS) and Makefile

3:55 PM : Tea Break

4:05 PM : Hands-on training on Apache web server and PHP configuration
4:35 PM : Introduction to Open Source Business Concepts
5:00 PM : Question & answer and Closing Session