UCSC and FOSS User Magazine celebrates the Software Freedom Day

11-Oct-2010

Software Freedom Day holds a great importance to FOSS lovers all over the world in order to celebrate the freedom over software and is being celebrated since 2004, in a grand scale. Similar to other countries Sri Lankan FOSS lovers too celebrate the SFD through out September and also in October.

FOSS Users magazine, the first magazine for FOSS in Sri Lanka organized its Inaugural  FOSS awareness event at Prof. V. K. Samaranayake Auditorium, University of Colombo in association with the Computer Society of University of Colombo, School of Computing (UCSC), on 23rd September 2010.

The event took place commencing at 8.00AM with the presence of around 200 undergraduates from the UCSC. The events’ content didn’t include only an Introduction to FOSS but also facts related to the development of FOSS related projects. Motivating undergraduates toward the FOSS related project development was the main objective of the event.

The secretary of the Computer Society welcomed the gathering and invited the former Director of UCSC Dr. Ruwan Weerasinghe to address the gathering. The Editor of the FOSS User Magazine also spoke up few lines before the first session started.

The first session was carried out by Mr. Buddhika Siddhisena, the CTO of Think Cube with an introduction to Free and OpenSource Software covering the basics of FOSS. Then the after a quick refreshments session, Mr. Vithanage Wathsala, senior software engineer from Lanka Software Foundation Introduced development tools which are needed in FOSS development namely such as virtual box, CVS, IRC and many more.

The session after the lunch break was handled by Mr.Dasunpriya Anuradha, the Community Manager in WSO2.He covered the part of joining with major FOSS projects taking WSO2 developers’ portal as the example. The next session was conducted by Ms. Karthiga Ratnam, Project Coordinator at Lanka Software Foundation.

The discussion panel was the last session of the event. Mr.Chatura Dilan from ICTA, Mr. Dasunpriya Anuradha, Mr. Karthiga Ratnam and Buddhika Kurera, the Editor of the FOSS User magazine were included in the panel. Undergraduates were given the opportunity of clarifying the grey areas raised throughout the event by questioning the panel members.

The event wounded up with the vote of thanks, given by Mr. Ravinda Senarath and compear for the event was Mr. Ramindu Deshapriya. Mr. Kanishka Niroshan, the Media Coordinator of FOSS User and Mr. Pathum Kalpa, the Linux Coordinator of FOSS User were also present at the event. The gratitude of the Editorial team of the FOSS User Magazine goes out to Dialog Broadband and ICTA for the support given to make this event a success.