[Ilugc] survey of FOSS success stories
- From: prasannadavid@xxxxxxxxx (Prasanna David G)
- Date: Sun Jun 15 22:51:23 2008
On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 3:51 PM, Kenneth Gonsalves <lawgon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
hi,
Sandip Saini of NRC-FOSS is doing his PhD in a study of foss methodologies.
As part of his work, he is trying to compile a set of FOSS success stories.
Definition:
<quote>
Documenting the success stories of FOSS implementation in India--
Nature, Scope and Methodology of the study.
Is the study only limited to India ?
I have been helping maintaining the main servers of
www.nepalwireless.netlocated in Pokhara for the past 3 years. This is
a big success story and
Mahabir Pun, the founder and leader of this project got the Magsasy award
for 2007. Nearly 20 villages which don't have any telecommunication link
and would take atleast a day's walk to reach are able to communicate with
neighbouring villages and to the outside world because of the network.
Asterisk is running in the server in Pokhara. The villagers are able to get
medical help from Doctors in Pokhara - using just simple webcams at both
ends - Telemedicine. They are able to sell/buy their products from
different villages using "HaatBazaar" - an e-commerce concept conceived
mainly for the scenario of these villages. Poor families - whose only
source of income is some one from their family working somewhere in some
other country - are able to communicate with them at lower cost through
email/chat. School children are able to get latest information from the
Internet. And this network as as an income generation for those village
schools. And the list goes on...
All these services are fully implemented using FOSS. Even the Linksys
router is running OpenWRT (believe it or not, one friend even got Asterisk
to run in that Linksys box - just in case the other server crashes.). The
old computers in the villages - which were mainly donated (or dumped) are
still running something between Windows 95 and NT though.
You can have a look at nepalwireless.com.np - which is the internal server
webpage. Let me warn you, we didn't design the server to keep people out -
but for anyone to get easier access to the services. This is not a
corporate house that either is worried about its competitions breaking in or
spending money in getting state-of-the-art hardware. One of the main
headache for me has been to trying to quickly do something when one of the
hardware components fail and keep the services running as much as possible.
Does this qualify your definition ?
regards,
Prasanna David
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