“The future of India, I believe, is tied to how innovative we can become.“ Michael Philps

TRIVANDRUM, TRIVANDRUM, INDIA, August 13, 2013 /EINPresswire.com/ -- 1. What are the government’s aims with ICFOSS? What is the background behind the mandate of this government initiative?
In Kerala the civil society and the media would only accept something that made sense in their political matrix. So our experience has been that we have had a very friendly and receptive audience here when we started talking about this because people felt that we should have options. We might choose this or that, but we have to have choices. We can’t be hemmed in because there is only one company and they produce what they want and the rest of us only use their stuff. So this was the aim with ICFOSS.”

2. How does ICFOSS interact with new businesses and how successful are the start up programmes?
“The problem we have with tech start up is that there is a lot of hype and excitement about start-ups, but technology is only one aspect of most the start-ups. The real problem with start-ups is not often the technology but the business idea.An open source start up is not like a company, we call it a VME or Virtual Microenterprise. The VME model was started in 2003 because we felt that Kerala had lots of people who are sitting at home for various reasons, especially women. Many of them are educated or technically qualified but out of the mainstream. Secondly there are also men who are not able to cooperate in the IT mainstream and at places like Techno Park. So we need a model that was friendly towards these sections, and we said open source because they can take up work sitting at home.
3. So can this model be used to spread these opportunities outside the city and outside Techno Park? Could this model help poorer areas move into the IT mainstream?
there was not much activity happening because the IT business was booming and everyone was getting jobs and services, and there is a certain tendency in Kerala for people to prefer jobs, they do not want to take the risk the risk of starting an enterprise. So currently what is in the open source model does not have to be a company. Using the open source model we can train them and they can actually learn the skills and operate in different areas, they don’t have to be in Techno Park. Last June we had this company Apache Software Foundation, which is one of the largest open source companies in the world, send people to US. Out of the 50 people we sent about 21 projects were proposed to the Apache community, and 7 were selected. There are also other programmes like Google Summer of Code, which is a project that actually pays.”
4. Is there a particular success story you could share with us?
“The teachers union, which is a left union, came to us and said they would like to explore these opportunities for our students. Teachers came and told us they didn’t want to lock up their students for generations, and they asked if we could help them. The programme is called ‘IT at School’ which has been running for the last 7 years or so, and is 100% free software using Linux. It has about half a million students passing through it every year and they have been able to utilise open source software to its full extent by not just consuming open source, but also creating it.”
5.Where do you see the IT market in India in 2020?
but the future of India, I believe, is tied to how innovative we can become. We are a very innovative people, and even the poorer people are innovative. We have no problems with English or maths and we already have a start in IT, so there is no reason why we cannot make a success of IT.

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Aishwarya
ThoughtFactoryPR
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