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Editorial
The wave of Free/Open Source Software has made a massive impact to world with the exponential increase in use of Free/Open Source Software and ever increasing consciousness among the people for Open Source. Apart from the minor crests and troughs, the real Tsunami happened to strike ABV-IIITM Gwalior on 12th August, 2008 when the Institute constituted Students’ Forum for Free/Open Source Software, a dedicated body to work for the development and promotion of Open Source. With active support from the faculty as well as the student community, the forum in its maiden year achieved many accomplishments, the major task undertaken being the conceptualization of the whole model.
Working with numerous people from multiple domains and diverse backgrounds motivated the need of compiled literature for FOSS with a multi- dimensional coverage. This ultimately resulted in Fibonacci, the International Open Source Magazine. Having its origin from the young student community, the magazine essentially aims in touching the hearts and souls of all the budding talents throughout the world and helping them understand, appreciate and ultimately contribute towards this novel concept of FOSS. The magazine wishes to unite the pioneers, eminent personalities and contributors of FOSS along with the rich community of faculty, scientists, developers, research scholars and students to collectively craft the movement and its recent developments for the enhancement of the community.
According to Gartner by 2012, more than 90% of the enterprise will use open source in direct or embedded forms. The ever-growing need of automation and computationally intelligent machines further stresses on the need and role of FOSS in the future. The radical change brought by FOSS in software, academia and virtually any sector it has touched has necessitated the means of re-realize, re-understand the practices and re-frame the underlying rules giving way to a lot of scope for research in future.
The exponential increase in FOSS requires an equal growth of community to enable optimal development. NASSCOM estimates that only 25 percent of technical graduates and approximately 15 percent of other graduates are considered employable by the rapidly growing IT and ITeS companies which further makes the entire task a big challenge. The most comprehensive tool to develop the community is education. The importance of education can be seen in the Indian context where the Government of India
floated Rs. 4,612 crores towards development of education through information and communication technology (ICT) as the eleventh five year plan.
The modern education presents a fascinating picture where learners get to learn from millions of people from diverse domains and experiences using a variety of tools and techniques provided by ICT. The concept of peer learning, community radios as well as learning from blogs, forums, videos and online encyclopedias marks a revolutionary manner of learning and imparting education. The development of knowledge grids and the promising steps towards open education, open curricula and open content further strengthens the foundations of the future education sector.
Imparting quality education has always been an art of forecasting the future and making the students prepare for the same. Hence the inculcation of open source as a concept and practice assumes an importance of its own. This first issue of Fibonacci is our contribution towards the development of human resource in making it possible to meet the increasing requirements. Accordingly the theme of the magazine is FOSS in academia. Fibonacci is a well studied series that preaches the spirit of building over the past, similar to the practice of development of open source software. Similar is the notion presented in the cover that represents a fractal built over recursion.
The entire magazine has been divided into three tracks. The first track talks about the basics of FOSS, second deals with the management and philosophical issues of FOSS and the third track is dedicated to the FOSS software and Linux. Besides various compilation shave been presented as promoted articles that talk about various aspects of the magazine theme.
The magazine has its contributions from various pioneers, people from academia, industry and students. The role of various FOSS groups, labs, organizations and mailing lists archives presented an already established community that largely contributed towards the promotion of magazine. This is a magazine entirely woven by the elements of the same community as a dedication to the enthusiasts.
I wish you all a very happy reading and a great future ahead.
Dr. Anurag Srivastava
Editor-in-Chief
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