Weekend Aantel’s Blog

“To everything (turn, turn, turn)
There is a season (turn, turn, turn)
And a time for every purpose, under heaven”

That tune is going round in my head since this evening. All because of the fact that the students of WBUT-LUG are organising a series of Installfests. The first one is scheduled on the 25th of August, with subsequent ones being planned on the following weekends. AFAIK, this will be the first installfest in this part of the country. The best however is that it is the students who have taken all the initiative. My team is only acting as facilitators.
Few people are aware of the background of WBUT-LUG. It all started back in 2004, when Sankarshan, before his RHAT days, Soumyadip, Sayamindu and myself had landed up at WBUT, following a call-to-arms by Prof. A. R. Thakur, then the Acting Vice Chancellor. He felt that we were essentially wasting our lives away, that we should do something useful for a change. “Useful” in our dictionary meant one thing - that we should use the fledgling University as the happy playgrounds for large-scale F/LOSS experimentation. To find out what works and what doesn’t, even better how to make it work. We were given a single point charter that read “Just Do it!” (well, Nike said it much before Prof. Thakur did
Being old LUG / GLUG / FSUG hands, one of things we tried was to incubate the Uni LUG. A mailing list was setup, meetings organised. Even Satish (Mohan) came and spoke at a meeting, as did several senior ILUG-CAL members, like Archan Paul et. al. However hard we tried to blow life into the LUG, it didn’t gain the necessary traction among the students. The faculty were the least interested, they were more concerned with having to cope with new stuff. And with no extra pay, there just was not enough incentives. The LUG fell into disarray. Disillusionment set in, and after about 8 months, even we gave up trying.

Since then there has been no WBUT-LUG to speak of. However, behind the scenes, a quiet change was taking place. WBUT’s network infrastructure, in-house servers, the digital library, desktops (both in the academic departments, as well as in the University offices), and the Labs were all getting shifted to FOSS. Today, over 95% of WBUT systems run completely on FOSS.

The guys who were in the 1st year, when this changeover started back in 2004, are today in their 4th year. They are the first generation of the WBUT students who have worked exclusively on FOSS. The earlier batches have all graduated and have left by this year (2007). The batches who have come after them have found FOSS the predominant presence.
It was a few 2nd year students of BTech (IT) and strangely enough about 8 - 10 students of 2nd Year, MTech (Biotech) who came up to me one day saying they wanted to organise a “Linux” workshop and if I would help them in doing so. I agreed on the condition that they would have to commit time to the effort and revive the WBUT-LUG.

They agreed! Somehow, the idea of a LUG got translated into something different. It was somewhere, where they could try out new stuff and hone their tech skills, away from the more restrictive lab environments. Part of this was due to witnessing first-hand the degree of freedom enjoyed by the participants of Fast-track FOSS Internship Programme.
Today, around 6:30 (my usual snack time), I went down to a nearby cafe. While I waited for my order to be served, a group of second year students came by. When they wished me, I asked them if they are participating in the InstallFest (which has been called a “hands-on workshop” so as not to raise the heckles of the powers-that-be

Every single one of them replied in affirmative. As we stood discussing how they would manage to bring in their system, two of them said “Sir, we’ll be buying our computers only after the Puja vacation, can we get a copy of Linux to load on our comps?”

I told them “But of course! Why do you ask?”, to which both of them added “স্যার, কারণ আমরা ওতে শুধু লিনাক্স‌ই লাগাবো… তাই” (”Because sir, we are going to install only Linux on our comps”)

Now, they didn’t say that to please me. I’m not a faculty, hence they wouldn’t get any extra credits from me However, having being exposed to FOSS as the predominant platform since joining up in engineering at WBUT, for these first time computer buyers, “Linux” was the de-facto choice, much the same way MSFT Windows have been now for the n-th generation of GUI users.

All that quiet work is only now beginning to show results… The tide, it seems is finally turning!

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 18th, 2007 at 2:36 am and is filed under FOSS, L2C2, WBUT, FOSS in Academia, ILUG-CAL.ORG. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.