The Open Source Movement At IIT Bombay

The FOSSEE Project at IIT Bombay is geared to promote the use of open source software in education and by extension, in the corporate world

“Catch ‘Em Young,” seems the motto of FOSSEE project at IIT Bombay. FOSSEE stands for Free and Open Source Software for Education. The FOSSEE (www.fossee.in) Project at IIT Bombay is geared to promote the use of open source software in education and by extension, in the corporate world.  

The activities of FOSSEE revolve around creating educational content around open source software and encouraging the  introduction of courses on open source in syllabi of universities, apart from promoting it through publicity initiative. Open Source software is available free and its source code is also available. The source code can be updated by any one and becomes accepted part of the software after going through diligent quality checks.

Of course, there are several open source software that we are all familiar with – Firefox, the web browser, Linux, the operating system, MySQL, the database, Apache, the webserver and of course, Python, PHP or Perl amoung the programming languages.  The FOSSEE project at IIT Bombay is involved in developing and promoting Scilab (for numerical calculation), OpenFOAM (for engineering calculations), Python (for programming) and Oscad (for electronic design). Professor Kannan Moudgalya, IIT Bombay is an Investigator of the FOSSEE project. FOSSEE project is part of the National Mission on Education through ICT with the thrust area being "Adaptation and deployment of open source simulation packages equivalent to proprietary software”, funded by Ministry of Human Resource Development, based at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB)...