Free Software Day woos youngsters

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More and more youngsters are shunning proprietary software and have started to use Open Source Software (OSS) in the city.

P. Raman, a database administrator at Southern Railway Hospital, Perambur and a member of the Indian Linux Users Group, Chennai said on the sidelines of software freedom day expo at D.G. Vaishnav College in the city on Saturday that there has been a rise in the number of youngsters who use open source software as they have the source codes which helps them to customise it for their needs.

“Five years ago college students had no clue about OSS but today you can see Linux and other free software in their computer,” he said.

T. Shrinivasan, another member of the group, said that they had conducted several seminars and workshops in colleges on the advantages of open source software.

“Ubuntu, one of the open source operating systems, has a lot of free software for education, science and several other purposes,” he said.

Prof S. Narasimhan, principal of D.G. Vaishnav College, Arumbakkam, said that his college had saved up to Rs 40 lakh by replacing proprietary software with open sourced ones.

“As our computer science lab has over 100 computers we were paying Rs 40 lakh as license fees for proprietary software for over a decade”, he said.

T. Santhanam, head of the computer science department, said several students were doing projects in open source software rather than proprietary ones as the country needs many OSS developers.