Open Source Challenge winners announced

The Open Source Challenge is conducted jointly by Red Hat and the eKalavya programme at IIT Bombay. The winners for 2004-05 have been announced. Scholarships worth Rs 10 lakh were awarded under different categories. The first prize winners were from the Army Institute of Technology, Pune. Their project titled ‘Virtual Private Server’ is used to provide multiple virtual hosting environments on the same physical server, thus eliminating the need for separate servers for hosting each Web site.

The programme, jointly conducted with the Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology at IIT Bombay, was announced last year, and the scholarship is an open source programme designed to encourage talent and spread the open source philosophy.

According to Javed Tapia, Director, Red Hat, “India has the largest number of engineering graduates, and given the right guidance the next Linus Torvalds can emerge from our own country.”

Says D B Pathak, Dean of the Kanwal Rekhi School, “The open source movement is extremely relevant to India’s future, and the objective of these scholarships is to inculcate the open source philosophy into the minds of students.”

The programme has participation from BE, BTech, MCA, MSc and MTech students from all over India. 33 students bagged the Red Hat Scholarship awards.

The year-long programme requires participants to submit project proposals, software requirement specifications, software design specifications and the final code. The evaluation standards used for deciding the winners are based on the quality of code, standards followed and the documentation submitted.