[FSF India] Free Software related Projects in India

M.P.Anand Babu fsf-india@gnu.org.in
Thu, 23 Aug 2001 23:42:53 +0530 (IST)


Hi Arun

 >     We need to make a catalogue of various Free Software related 
 > projects going on in India(not only the software development project,
 > but relating to  Freedom) and people and organisations providing
 > services on Free Software. 
 >     
 >     Any comments ? 
This should be first step to proceed.
Yes Not just software, any initiative towards Freedom.

 > BTW Anand Babu, I've seen a list of projects sent by you to 
 > GNU-India list. Can you forward the same to this list. We will 
 > add them to www.gnu.org.in. 

I have pasted the list along with this mail. This list is
too informal to get into the website. I prefer a proper
work structure before they all become official.

A proper work structure will have 
* Project RoadMap
* Project Admin/Coordinator, Team Members, Doc Writer,
Release Technician ...
* Atleast one tar ball release (atleast beta)
* Documentation
* GNU GPL/Equivalent License

By doing this way it becomes easier for others to
join the team and easily contribute either by
coding or testing. All this step is required to
make the first official release. Till that stage
mailing list will to.

I use sourceforge.net as by /tmp and when 0.1 ver
is ready, I move to savannah.gnu.org

This list is cutcopied from a mail. BTW lets move the gnu-india.org
mailing list to FSF-I list. It takes pain to move all that 108
subscribers all of a sudden to this list. But we need to avoid
duplication !!


1) GNU Messenger:
   by ab, Bala, Mridul Jain, Parag Mehta, Jeffrin
   GNU Messenger for Yahoo services with a console based geeky
   readline and guile interface. It started a fun project, but today
   its production ready. Main motivation behind the project is to
   spread the power of GUILE and READLINE librady.

   You have shown ur interest in Lisp   
   I'm writing more about Guile here, because Guile is a 
   dialect of Lisp and one of the most important project of GNU.
   Like you, we all believe that Lisp is Next Generation Language.
   Its going to reappear soon. Its the only answer for AI and
   Next Generation Computing.
   
   Guile is *Project GNU's extension language*

   Guile is a library designed to help programmers create flexible
   applications. Using Guile in an application allows programmers to
   write plug-ins, or modules (there are many names, but the concept
   is essentially the same) and users to use them to have an
   application fit their needs.

   Guile is an interpreter for the Scheme programming language,
   packaged as a library which can be incorporated into your
   programs. Your users have full access to the interpreter, so Guile
   itself can be extended, based on the needs of the user. The result
   is a scripting language tailored to your application.

   For more info visit http://www.gnu.org/software/guile

2) Cool Hurd Translators:
   Translator itself is cool concept in GNU/Hurd. 
   Here are some translators written by college students in
   this list:
   * bzip2 translator:
	 Ankur, Shikka and Venkat wrote this translator. This
	 when mapped on a file, you can do bzip compressed I/O.
   * reverse translator:
	 Written by Ramesh. When mapped to a file, what ever you
	 write to it, you can read the reverse of them.
   * Tar file system translator:
         Again by Ramesh. Ramesh got the name "Tarzen" because of
	 this TAR project. You can mount a tar file as file system
	 using this translator. This project is still in initial
	 stages.
   * Quote translator:
	 You can map this as ur .signature, /etc/issues, /etc/motd 
	 and so on and get random quotes on the fly. Every time 
	 when you read from this file, you get random quotes from
	 its database.

3) Visual Emacs Calculator:
   by Pradhap
   This is written in Emacs Lisp. He is currently busy with
   MP3 player for GNU Emacs.

4) GNU Hurd Asynchronous Message Debugger:
   This project is given to me by RMS.
   It should facilitate a mechanism to debug(record/replay)
   asynchronous messages between GNU Mach and GNU Hurd.

5) MiG -> CORBA:
   By Mridul Jain and ab
   MiG is obsolete interface and Mach Specific. This project
   replaces MiG with CORBA standards to make GNU/Hurd
   language independent and distributed. This is extremely
   big project.

6) Linux Device Drivers Emulation in Hurd Space:
   By ab, Bala and Mridul
   Emulating Linux Device Drivers in user space. GNU Mach
   is only a micro kernel. Santhanu Goel emulated Linux
   SCSI and Network drivers inside GNU Mach. But GNU Mach
   bloats up in size and loses the Mirco Kernel stature.
   But by bringing the drivers to user space we have lots
   of advantages like system stability, modularization
   ease of development/maintainability.

7) Porting Netfilter to Hurd
   By ab
   Netfilter is NAT/Firewall framework in Linux 2.4.x
   kernel. This should be ported to GNU Hurd/Pfinet.
   Hurd's TCP/IP stack is derived from Linux kernel
   and because of that porting Netfilter to Hurd
   shouldn't be difficult.

8) GNU/Hurd Distribution:
   By gnu-india.org team.
   We have stopped this project, because Philip Charles
   <philipc@copyleft.co.nz> is doing it better. But still
   we continue the 3rd CD of this project. This CD is 
   named "4-hackers" contains valuable documentation for 
   GNU OS Hacking

9) GNU Geek:
   by Visu and Nagappan
   GNU Geek is GNU [G]eek [E]nabled [E]ntry [K]it
   Geek is a highly extensible framework for building console
   based data entry tools.  is powered by GUILE and READLINE.

-- 
Addicted to GNU Emacs
Inspired by GNU (www.gnu.org)