Virtusa, an IT services company founded in 1996, was using proprietary version control and collaboration systems to develop software for its clients until Sri Lankan founder Kris Canekeratne decided that a custom solution built on open source components was a better fit for internal use. As a result, the company ended up saving millions of dollars on licensing fees and acquisition costs.

The goal of Red Hat High is to use free software to introduce disadvantaged kids to technology they might not otherwise be able to afford, encouraging them to pursue further education and career opportunities. Red Hat High bundles free software alternatives to expensive proprietary applications on a Fedora live CD that campers can take with them to use on any computer. The program has been in “beta” for two years, according to Greg DeKoenigsberg, Red Hat’s director of community development. “The first two years have been good,” he says. “Lots of happy kids and happy parents.” He calls it a successful trial, but one that must “scale up” in order to continue to be successful. “We’re not in the business of doing small things at Red Hat.”

Camp is in session for one week in July, on the campus of North Carolina State University. During the day, the 50 Red Hat High campers learn how to create audio and video files, design Web sites, and build 3-D animations using free software like Audacity and Blender. The evenings are reserved for field trips to bowling alleys and movies and other fun activities. DeKoenigsberg says, “We took them to the Digital Circus, a junior college level school for learning the same stuff they were learning at Red Hat High. One of the students at Digital Circus was showing them what he’s learned. ‘This is a wireframe,’ he said, and they said, ‘We learned all of that already.’ Then the professor comes in and says, ‘Let’s show you some stuff that you don’t know. Do any of you know what IK is?’ And they said, ‘Yes, that’s inverse kinematics.’” Free software gives the children the ability to learn the same techniques and skills that college-level students are learning, at a much lower cost, DeKoenigsberg says. Maya, the 3-D computer animation application that students at the Digital Circus use, can cost $7,000. Blender is free.

Now that DeKoenigsberg has two years of Red Hat High under his belt, he’s ready to take the program to the next level. “There’s some cost to holding a residential summer camp, and it doesn’t scale as well as we would like,” he says. Red Hat can provide all the financial backing necessary to translate the program into something that can serve the needs of more kids. “We would like to develop a strong affiliation with some entity that can house the kids,” DeKoenigsberg says. “We don’t run a residential summer camp as our core competency at Red Hat. But what we can do is gather a community of developers and users around open content for an important social purpose.”

DeKoenigsberg hopes that the education kids received at Red Hat High can be translated into something portable and scalable. “We putting together a deployable curriculum in a box, and making sure we have something that is turnkey.” The lessons have to be understandable and usable by the average junior high school teacher, so that more than just a handful of children each year benefit from the program. “If it’s only going to be 50 kids, it’s not worth doing,” DeKoenigsberg says. “It doesn’t make enough of an impact. The opportunity for free software to change the way kids learn is too big.” Along with the goal of making a teacher-friendly curriculum, DeKoenigsberg says it is important to get some real world feedback from actual teachers. “We are developing the curriculum in a wiki style, so that teachers can change it directly. After that, the next priority is internationalization.

DeKoenigsberg admits there are some real world challenges associated with providing kids with a free software alternative. One of those is the fact that just having a live CD is not enough for a student who doesn’t have access to a computer outside of school hours. And even for those who can use a computer at the library or elsewhere, saving files once they have been created can be a problem. At Red Hat High, each student had a scratch space on the network on which to save files. DeKoenigsberg says one of the possible future projects for the Red Hat High community is to bundle the files on a bootable, writable USB key. “The cost of that will become lower over time.”

As the senior community development manager, DeKoenigsberg is used to the idea of building a community around a cause. “People are deeply incented to spread the goodness of free software,” he says. “And the educational market is strategic to people who care about the advancement of free software. It’s strategic to the company for obvious reasons, and to the community for similar reasons.” He compares the philosophy behind Red Hat High to his company’s involvement with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. “We have a very calculated social consciousness. OLPC is about getting that laptop into the hands of as many kids as possible. Red Hat High is about getting the understanding of what free software can do into the brains of as many kids as possible.”

Kuhn says a Lindows insider tipped the FSF off to the possibility of missing source code. Lindows insiders are those who have registered and paid a $99 fee to receive beta releases of LindowsOS and other non-public information. LindowsOS is a distribution based on the Linux kernel, which is licensed under the GNU General Public License. The GPL states, in part, that the program instructions in their original form as written by the programmer (source code) must be available to users of the program. The GPL also requires that users be allowed to copy, modify and redistribute the program freely, but they must in turn provide the source code.

Robertson does not deny that the source code for LindowsOS isn’t included in either of the two beta releases. “It’s a work in progress. We’re hopeful our first release will happen around the middle of the year. When we release an official version, all the GPL pieces will be properly distributed.”

Robertson doesn’t appreciate the negative attention focused on the Lindows project, likening it to “eating your young.” He says he is surprised that “some in the Linux community are quick to cast aspersions, with no facts.” Robertson points to his contributions to the Open Source community as proof that he has its best interests at heart, beginning with his career at MP3.com.

“We battled for the consumer at every step. We battled for open formats. We fought against secure music schemes. And we made contributions to Open Source software, since MP3.com was entirely LAMP based.”

And now that he’s working on making the Linux desktop a reality, Robertson says his dedication to Open Source continues. “We’ve joined KDE League at the highest corporate level. We hosted and sponsored Wineconf 2002. We worked with the project leader to identify the top 25 contributors and paid for roundtrip airfare for all of them, from as far away as South Africa and Norway, to San Diego. There was no registration fee. We also sponsored LPBN.org to broadcast the event.

“We’ve agreed to sponsor the upcoming Debian conference. Our sponsorship included funds to pay for an awards banquet for all attendees, as well as travel support for some. We’ve made a large investment in an Open Source company; we’ve also paid about a million dollars to get code produced … We’ve paid these funds to companies as well as individuals.”

And, he says, support for Linux and the Open Source community will also come by way of ingenious marketing. “If we can get to 5% market share, an ecosystem of healthy Linux companies will emerge which will be around for the long run. Look at the incredible things that would happen. Hardware manufacturers will ship Linux drivers for their peripheral devices, in the box. Computer stores will dedicate sections of their store. Major OEMs would ship computers with Linux. It’s a travesty you can’t walk into major retailers today and buy a computer running Linux.”

And while the code is important, that is not what it will take to get Linux to “20 million desktops.” Robertson says to help more people understand Open Source, better marketing and lobbying is needed. “And yes, battling Microsoft and their huge coffers which influence OEMs, retailers, politicians, and the press in ways you only understand if you talk to them personally, which I have.

“Hopefully, Lindows.com will contribute on each of these fronts, but it will take more than one company. It’s a shame that virtually every commercial Linux company has abandoned the desktop. Our goal is to build a company that will give consumers a choice for their operating system. At the same time, we’re committed to being a good corporate citizen and being a supporter of Open Source for the long run.”

Robertson seems dismayed by the FSF’s attempt to enforce the GPL. “No wonder there’s virtually no healthy Linux companies. The community seems to attack them when the real focus should be elsewhere.”

Robertson says that many of the critical pieces of GPL code that have gone into Lindows have been distributed back to the community already. “Where do you think that Codeweavers got their code for Crossover Office?” he asks.

A high level source at Codeweavers confirms that Lindows has indeed contributed an “enormous amount” of code to the Wine project. But while Crossover Office contains code that was created in conjunction with Lindows, it has also been built on code that was around before Lindows existed. According to the Codeweavers source, Lindows returned modifications to the Wine codebase only because it was persuaded by Codeweavers staff to return it. The Codeweavers/Lindows association was terminated in part because Lindows wanted to be able to keep its Wine modifications private.

We women make up more than half the population, so by no means are we a minority. Yet we claim a minority status of sorts in the IT world, where depending on who you talk to, women make up somewhere from 20% to 30% of the workforce. This topic is the focus of many heated discussions on Internet mailing lists frequented by women in IT. Many believe the low number of females in computer science occupations is a problem that needs to be fixed. Girls, they say, are being actively discouraged by parents, peers, and teachers from entering fields considered by society to be too “geeky” for women.

If you listen to these pundits, you may begin to believe that girls are champing at the bit to become technologists, but are being forced to instead enter fields like sociology, health care, or services. Some are even being handcuffed to the kitchen sink and forced to become stay-at-home mothers, the worst possible punishment of all, because everyone knows that no one in her right mind would ever want to do anything as subservient and unrewarding as raising a brood of unruly children to be the next generation of leaders. All these poor girls want is to be just like men: aggressive, logical, and task-oriented, and we’re forcing them to go against their nature and be nurturing, emotional, and relationship-oriented. It’s a crime. But I digress.

Assuming that the relative paucity of women in the IT industry is a problem that needs fixing, is creating a new “Girls’ Linux Distribution” going to help? I say no. If we want to become part of the industry, why would we want to separate ourselves and draw attention to our differences? If we’re trying to say that women have all the same aptitudes and tendencies that men in IT have, it makes no sense to then say that we need or want our own flavor of Linux.

What would we include in this distro? Pink butterfly themes? Shopping calculators? Does that sound insulting? It should. So I ask again, what exactly would we include in a female version of Linux? The longer you think about this, the more ridiculous it sounds. In fact, if you believe that there are men out there who really do want to keep women out, it sounds like an idea that misogynists would push just to keep us separate. “Aw, look at those cute little girls playing at technology — they even made their own Starbucks icons!” I can hear it now.

Some say that the reason for a women’s distribution would be to give women the opportunity to work on creating a custom version of Linux. This insinuates, again, that women are being excluded from participating in development of other distributions — that there are hundreds of women out there who would be madly coding away if only they were allowed to, if only someone would hold the gate open for them, if only someone would invite them to participate in the creation of a girly GUI. That otherwise, they’re just too scared and shy, and incapable of jumping in there with the boys.

The fact is that most women I know outside of the IT industry are more tech-savvy than the men in their lives. They are the ones who have embraced the Internet and the gadgets that accompany it. They are the ones who communicate mostly by email, and their husbands and boyfriends and fathers and brothers are still stuck on the phone and can’t boot the computer without someone holding their hand. According to Nielsen, women make up the majority of Internet users, and they spend a lot more money on technology than men do. Just because most of them do not choose to make a living at it doesn’t mean that women are somehow lacking in the ability to understand and absorb the concept of technology.

Creating a special Linux distribution as though it were a delightful surprise that we can use Linux at all is not going to help our image. Special Linuxes are for people with USB keys and religious sensibilities. We women are doing just fine, thanks.

Free software fans around the world are forming local teams that will work together to create events specific to their localities, including educational seminars, product giveaways, and free software demonstrations. “The day is completely free and there will be giveaways, prizes, and further information about how you can do your bit to help ensure technology doesn’t act to lock down our human rights,” says Pia Waugh, the newly elected president of Software Freedom International (SFI), the official support organization for Software Freedom Day. Nine board members from around the world chart the course for current and future Freedom Days, facilitating team requests for organizational help and giveaway items such as T-shirts.

This year, teams and individuals can compete in categories like “Best Event Photo,” “Best SFD Blog Coverage,” and “Best SFD Event.” IBM is giving away five POWER5 servers to the top-winning teams, and individuals will get free Software Freedom Day T-shirts signed by board members.

Matt Oquist, an SFI board member and one of the founders of Software Freedom Day, says that response to this year’s SFD has been good. “In 2004 and 2005 we contacted LUGs via email to encourage them to start SFD teams,” he says, “but this year we just contacted the team leaders from [last year] and we still grew by approximately the same percentage.” Oquist says SFD is so much fun that people are naturally drawn to it. “It really charges up everybody involved. Immediately afterward we always get a bunch of feedback, emails, and pictures. Each successive SFD draws in more people who would’ve been involved the year before if they’d just known about it.”

Waugh says this year there are more than 150 teams so far, with more entries coming in every day. Each team consists of anywhere from two to 30 volunteers. Waugh says each team can reach up to 3,000 people with the message of free software, which is important, she says, because our lives revolve around technology. “This means ultimately our basic human freedoms such as the freedom of association, or the freedom of speech, are only as free as the technology we use to exercise those freedoms.”

For Oquist, SFD is about changing minds. “One important step on the road to Software Freedom is for a majority of the world to recognize the availability and quality of free software. People have been talking for years about the ‘year of Linux on the desktop.’ There are a multitude of factors affecting the delay of Linux desktop adoption, but one of the primary ones seems to be this chicken-and-egg problem. Nobody wants to be first. I’m hoping to see 10 years during which a tidal force sweeps through the world, decimating beyond recovery the degree of the proprietary stranglehold on computing freedom.”

The official deadline for registering teams for SFD has passed, but you are welcome to make a late entry, says Waugh, or simply join a nearby existing team. “Check out the Web site or a team near you, or even start an event yourself. It could be a barbecue, a picnic, an installfest, talks, competitions, whatever you like.” She stresses, “Freedom isn’t just for geeks. Freedom is for everyone.”

Svoboda, in making it his goal to better understand and care for the street people of Toronto, is thinking outside the box. In 2003, he launched a ground-breaking, and eyebrow-raising, new program at Seaton House, in conjunction with nearby St. Michael’s hospital, that allows the homeless to enter the program with their bottles, which are stored. Seaton workers then distribute small glasses of wine to the men on an hourly basis. This seems counterintuitive, but Svoboda says it actually reduces alcohol consumption and trades hard liquor for a more benign substance in a controlled environment. Getting them in the doors is the important part. Then, as the doctors and staff gain the clients’ trust, a lot of them drink less. Some of them even take further steps to recover from their illnesses and resume a normal life.

The initiative was reaching some men, but Svoboda knew it wouldn’t be enough. The program at Seaton was temporary, and most of the men went back to the streets and the deadly environment they call home. Sooner or later, they ended up at Seaton or St. Michael’s, where they were treated for whatever immediate problem had surfaced, and then released. With a vicious cycle of “treat, release, treat, release,” no one was getting the kind of long-term care and followup so desperately needed. Svoboda decided that what the local organizations needed was a system of coordination that would keep track of the men while still respecting their privacy and allowing them to maintain some control in their care.

Svoboda says he’s not particularly technology-savvy, so at first the system was strictly a paper trail. “We were doing it through paper forms and meetings with staff,” he says. “It worked, in the sense that the individual personalities involved were very enthusiastic, but the information flow was problematic.” It was tedious and time-consuming to fill out the forms every time a client came in, and depending on the severity of the situation, paperwork was less important than saving a life.

But the paper-based system was better than no system at all. The project was deemed successful by the city of Toronto, which asked Svoboda to begin a city-wide integration of what would soon be called the Shelter Hospital Integration Fusion and Evaluation (SHIFE). With several more institutions to coordinate, Svoboda realized that he needed more than paper. “We knew a lot of the work could be done more efficiently if we developed an information system. All the various tasks that need to be done, like ordering medicines and transcribing doctors’ orders, have to be done with limited staff, and we wanted to make it all streamlined.” Svoboda and his team tried to create a software application from scratch, but that effort fell apart because management at Seaton and St. Michael’s didn’t consider it a high priority. “It went belly up,” he says. “It was on volunteer time and we had volunteer developers. We made some requests for quotes from software developers, and they were $300-400K with $40K licensing fees. That was beyond anything we could do.”

SHIFE went to the city and asked for $1.7 million in funding. It took a long time to go through, and the program received only $700K, but that was enough to get started on a computerized system. Still, Svoboda didn’t want to spend all of SHIFE’s money on software development. He consulted with the developer who had volunteered his time to begin building the original system, Johan Macedo, who had since gotten a job coding for the city of Toronto. “He did a bunch of research on what the best options would be, and decided that the software he’d originally worked on was outdated,” Svoboda says. “He came across OSCAR, and said, ‘Why don’t we take this and build on it?’”

The Open Source Clinical Application Resource (OSCAR) began in 1988 as a simple DOS medical records system written by Dr. David Chan while he was a student at McGill University in Montreal. When Macedo found OSCAR, it had matured into a complete client-server application designed for the Linux operating system, and licensed under the terms of the GPL. “We met with David Chan and he got very excited,” Svoboda says. “We all thought this was going to be really great.” Macedo set about creating enhancements and modules on top of OSCAR.

With a new foundation to build on, Client Access to Integrated Services and Information (CAISI) was born as a new phase of Macedo’s project. “We’re still sorting out the branding of everything,” Svoboda says. Though CAISI remains a development project separate from OSCAR, “It’s all very collegial -– we see it all as contributing to OSCAR.” CAISI has spurred new activity in a true open source development project that is inviting developers to share their talents with a cause that hopes to do some real good in Toronto.

And this coding project is one that isn’t like to go “belly up” anytime soon. The new modules and functionality are opening up new distribution avenues for OSCAR. “What we’ve found is that the functionality we thought was very specific [to CAISI] turns out is very applicable in a doctor’s office too. We have a need to have case management for different programs so a client can have a record of care,” he says. “In a doctor’s office, they have different programs of care as well, perhaps with a dietitian or a nurse practitioner, or social work programs, and they want to keep track.”

He stresses that the software development is a subset of CAISI, which is itself a system of procedures to coordinate efforts between care providers. The technology is merely a means to an end -– but it is still an important means. “We have about six agencies using the software now,” Svoboda says. “We’re about to launch an integrator,” which is code that will allow all the agencies to refer clients between them. “Our aim is to have full integration by November or December, and to get further funding to continue development. If that doesn’t happen, we hope to have at least three solid months of operations.” With funds coming from the ministry of health, Svoboda is trying to get other cities involved, and is exploring the idea of “pay what you can” with some agencies. A customized version of the software will cost other agencies $15,000, plus another $2,500 for necessary hardware.

Svoboda says he is glad he discovered open source software. He had only heard of Linux before getting involved with this development project. “I’m a physician, I don’t follow this kind of stuff,” he says. “When Johan told us about this and we all got excited, I read the book The Cathedral and the Bazaar , and got so impressed by the whole movement and how it works. Since then, I’ve changed my browser to Mozilla, and I’m trying to get OpenOffice.org on my computer.” About the CAISI development project, he says, “It’s been working out so well. We’re all crazy open source freaks now.”

The current PC Garage, which began in March at the Asian Americans for Equality Community Technology Center, is scheduled to end this month. Normally, the PC Garage sessions run three months, but this workshop is going so well that the Center decided to extend it for an extra month. Eighteen students between the ages of 14 and 18 gather each week to tinker with computers, watch videos, and discuss articles, while DaSilva and his cohorts at CFSG go to great lengths to find hardware donors, collect the equipment, transport it to the community centers, format disks, update BIOS, and make sure each system is in working order for the eager pupils.

Why go to all that trouble? “It’s information they don’t get from the typical Community Technology Center programs,” DaSilva says. “The kids seem to get a lot out of it. The kids in our workshops not only learn about good software, but they learn how to identify and put together hardware. With free software, there is never any impediment to making the equipment useful.”

DaSilva says it makes him happy when he hears from previous students who are still using the computers they received at PC Garage. “We had two sisters who took our program,” he says, “and one of them recently started coming back to the center. She told me she is taking a Cisco routing class that her high school offers. She said because of our program the hardware stuff she doing is easy, but she is having trouble with the Windows stuff.”

But with all the knowledge participants gain about software and computer systems, DaSilva says the bottom-line benefit of the PC Garage workshops is that “participants learn about technology that respects their freedom.” And the workshops help more than just the young people who attend them. “We’re trying to help out with computer recycling,” he says. “New York City has a lot of equipment that gets discarded as trash by residents or donated by large companies looking to upgrade their facilities.”

Since CFSG depends on donations to make its programs run, DaSilva says the group is always looking for spare computer systems and RAM. But it also takes manpower to keep CFSG going. “Though we occasionally solicit help from acquaintances, we haven’t formally made any public requests for participation,” DaSilva says. “CFSG is looking to build solid infrastructure; if someone volunteers their time and supports our mission we’d consider asking them to join our Board of Directors.”

The CFSG BoD has grown from the original four to a total of six, with assistance from the “non-profit world, like Elizabeth Wilson of AAFE and local businessmen, like Alex Pilosov of Pilosoft Colocation Services,” DaSilva says. “It seems like the idea of helping community service organization offer free software-based programs was just waiting to happen.”

CFSG is putting together a program that will help high school students learn programming concepts, and it currently offers a 3-D animation course using Blender3D. “We’re [also] putting together graphics workshops featuring the GIMP and Inkscape, as well as an audio editing course with Audacity.”

If you’re interested in helping CFSG bring free software to the communities of NYC, write to info@cfsg.org.