The spirit of the Software Freedom Day was truly alive the 20th and 21st of this September at the Jaypee Institute of Information Technology University. As planned by the JIIT Sun Club (the now JIIT OSUM), we devoted an entire weekend rather than a just celebrating SFD on a day, to celebrate the virtues of free/open-source software, and also to encourage its use, for the benefit of our students. The celebration spanned 7 events in totality, which included 2 talks, 2 hands-on-labs, 1 install fest and 1 mega competition.

The team worked hard planning for this event. We had many length discussions and regular brainstorming sessions for getting ideas for events. All planning was done systematically, in a streamlined manner with regular meetings of the team. As soon as we got permissions for hosting the event, posters were put up all around the campus to promote it, and these too were designed by the team. We already have Solaris ready and working on 120 systems in our lab, but since the 2 hands-on labs focussed on Netbeans completely, we decided to install its latest update - NetBeans IDE 6.5 Beta along with the Wireless Toolkit in one of our computer labs. Check out the photos snapped during the installation (kind of behind-the-scenes of our SFD preps).

Our initial plan was to have a talk on FOSS right upfront at the beginning of our SFD celebrations, but we got a big surprise with the arrival of special guests to our campus, and there was sudden change of plan actioned one day before the event, a change for the good. Our first guest was Siddharth Batra, who is an alumni of JIIT, now studying at Stanford University. Our second guest was Priyank Singh, who is also an alumni of JIIT and now works at Marvell Semiconductors, Inc. Both of them are undoubtedly the best students JIIT has ever produced till date, and till they were in college, they caused a lot of improvement and change, and did a lot for their juniors, for the CSE/IT department and in turn for the university. We were honored to have them inaugurate our SFD celebrations by speaking a few words as a kind of birds of a feather session with the juniors who'll be attending the event.

Day 1

And so, the celebrations of Software Freedom Day at JIIT began in full swing the saturday afternoon with a warm welcome from me, the host for the day, who first thanked everyone for participating in this wonderful occasion, talked about the meaning of SFD and why it is celebrated, showed a map of all of communities who are conducting similar events in 500 different parts of the world. He then played a video interview of Stephen Fry speaking about his thoughts on open source and its essence. The video was shot at GNU's 10th birthday, and as such the video ended with Stephen blowing out the candles on the GNU's birthday cake. Then I introduced our honorable guests, Sid sir and Priyank sir (as we like to call them), invited them on stage to speak about their learning and experiences gained during their journey in the world of computer science, programming and research. Sid sir delivered a very motivational speech to the students, speaking in utmost modesty as he explained how he evolved.  

The inaugural event was followed by a much enjoyed, convivial round of 'Spoof & Goof', our technical dumbcharades event. This event drew its basic idea from the traditional dumb charades, adding on a bit of technical spice to it. Participants were selected at random from audience and they were given clues any open source technology. First the participant had to guess the technology from the clue and then convey the same either by enacting or drawing it in such a way that the audience got a clear picture of it. The participants as well as the first to answer from the audience were awarded with prizes which included pens, key chains, and open source software DVD's and many more give away surprises. Unfortunately our SFD goodies hadn't arrived in time for the event so we noted down the name of the winners. The participants were completely involved and excited to come on the stage to act and ofcourse to win exciting goodies ;). By means of this fun game, participants got to know more about the open source technologies and alternatives to various softwares. This fun-filled one hour brought a new life to the celebrations.

Nowadays most new mobile phones are able to run downloadable applications, not just the ones preinstalled on the device by the manufacturer. Following Spoof & Goof, we had our hands on workshop on developing Java ME applications using Netbeans aka 'jMobileZone' which marked the end of first day celebrations of SFD. The session included development of a SMS sending project in NetBeans IDE 6.5 beta. Each and every participant followed him step by step to make the application on their own system. The event lasted for 2 hours and was taken by me. It was the most sought after event and was attended by about 45 inquisitive participants. The session clearly brought out the message that development of mobile application in Java followed by its deployment onto a Java enabled mobile is an easy and fun to do thing with Netbeans mobility support. Though this module was a good example, there is a scope for development of applications for the device's own operating system or platform independent application that are run on special virtual machine(VM) software on the device. Using NetBeans as a platform for development of J2ME applications, participants got a clear idea that the former offers a special environment for creating platform independent applications on mobile phones and other handheld device. Participants learnt about the flow designer, the screen designer, about displayables, commands, MIDLETs, etc. The entire crowd from morning events had attended the workshop.

This concluded a successfully conducted Day 1 of our Software Freedom Day celebrations - it totally rocked! And this wasn't it, the second day was a lot more heavier and intense than the first! - and had a sweet little surprise to - free pizzas during the install fest!

Day 2

All of us assembled again in the morning of the second day of our SFD celebrations to begin with the much awaited talk on Free and Open Source Software by me. The talk was held with a very clear perspective to introduce open source and tell everyone what it actually implies, about its history, about who all are the people behind the movement, and their interesting story. The talk was assited with in-slide videos clipped out from the popular movie on open source - Revolution OS. Interesting clips showing interviews of the leading lights of the open source movement were shown to tell the story of its very origin by the people who started it, themselves - mainly Richard Stallma, Eric Raymond and Linus Torvalds. I talked about the GNU, the FSF, the Open Source intiative, about the 2 camps that had setup, and then about how Linux proved the worth of FOSS. There was also a detailed discussion on licenses, supported by prominent examples of open source software complying with the terms of different breeds of licenses (CDDL vs GPL, etc.). Cool features of Open Office like embedding videos itself into the slides were demonstrated.

At the end, we had a brief session with the audience, when they got a chance to clear their doubts, myth and misconceptions, if any. The event attracted around 55 curious participants and lasted for about an hour (we had to stop the session since Pizza was getting cold and people couldn't wait!)

We then moved onto the computer lab. All participants brought their laptops for the much awaited Install@Fest. The install really was the soul of the celebration of SFD. We setup kind of a human freedom toaster where anyone could come and get their CD/DVD burned with (any) free software out of our collection. The main theme of the event was to get free software, install it on their systems and get help doing it. I gave a little talk on VirtualBox and how to OpenSolaris 2008.05 into it. Students were told about the benefits of using OpenSolaris - ZFS, Zones, Dtrace, SMF, etc and the ability to boot into a complete OS by just running a DVD. OpenSolaris Starter Kit DVD's were distributed to all participants. And now comes the fun part. To add revelry to the event, FREE Pizzas and softdrinks were server to all the 50-60 registered participants. It was the most fun event of our entire line up of events! (free software with free pizzas - a deadly combination!)

After the successful completion of Install@Fest, we had a hands-on-lab session on NetBeans Plug-in Development, conducted by Varun Nischal, previous year JIIT Sun Club coordinator, NetBeans Community Docs Coordinator and NetBeans Dream Team Member. Varun briefly introduced the NetBeans IDE to the students, as they were using it for the first time. Focus was on practical usage of NetBeans Platform and understanding the basics before plunging into deeper levels. Thought provoking questions were asked by Varun from time-to-time, which made this session a more interactive and unique one, as Varun had some slides to complement the exercises. Students were given 2 exercises, who followed step-by-step approach opted by Varun, as everyone was new to NetBeans IDE. The 1st exercise covered the basics of creating an Action in NetBeans, discussing the various types and the changes that took place since NetBeans 6.1 FCS. Then, as a part of 2nd exercise, Varun explained the importance of XML Layer and System Filesystem, what is it all about, also demo'ed some tweaks which can have yield useful results in short time. The plug-in was developed with comfort and displayed "Hello World!" using the newly created Action from inside the NetBeans IDE. Now, after taking the students out-of-the-box, Varun ended the session by discussing the future prospects of the plug-in development, and provided resources to look into for further study. After all, open source is all about exploring and learning through self study. The session was attended by 48 students, and lasted for nearly 60 minutes.

TuckTrail marked a wonderful end of JIIT's SFD celebrations. This unique mega competition was held in three rounds: A Debugging round, A Treasure hunt round and a programming round.  The preliminary round consisted of debugging some part of code, written in C++/Java, which had to be debugged using Open Source IDE's like NetBeans, Sun Studio, or the GNU tools (gcc, gdb, etc.) which entirely depended on the preference/knowledge of the participants as an expression of their freedom to choose. The second round was an online treasure hunt where the participants obtained clues one after the other by solving technical riddles inside a web browser, finally leading to the location of a file stored on a server on the LAN containing the question to the prgramming contest round. In the final round, the programming problem needed to be implemented, again using any open source technologies as mentioned above. At the end of the two hour event, the top two scorers out of the 52 participants were awarded with 4 GB and 2 GB pen drives respectively. 

During the debugging round, only 4 of the entire 52 participants were successfully able to debug the code under the time constraint of 20 minutes. Bonus points were given for the same. After the initial 20 minutes, the Link which also happens to be the output of the first round was given to all the participants so that they can proceed with the next round, i.e. the online treasure hunt. In the treasure hunt, only 2 participants were able to track down the hints in a correct fashion, and finally reached to the programming contest question, whereas 5 other participants were only close to the final link, but did not get it. Meanwhile the other participants were provided with necessary hints to guide them through the entire course of second round from time to time. Failing to perform under the time limit, the rest were then provided with the final link of questions. The programming round served to be a very interesting end to this mega event, as the programming contest questions were designed in the manner that they could easily test the very wits of any efficient programmer. Finally on the basis of scores of each round and number of questions successfully attempted in the last round, two winners were declared at the end and were awarded with the prizes by Abhinav and me.

I thank everyone who's helped us to make this possible, especially the JIIT OSUM Team for this tremendous effort:

Abhinav Shrivastava, Abhishek Punj, Anubhav Dayal, Prabodh Prakash, Ritika Gupta, Robin Pahwa

This video captures the excitement of students at the end of SFD celebrations at JIIT.

All photos of the event:
Software Freedom Day Celebrations at JIIT University (Day 0)
Software Freedom Day Celebrations at JIIT University (Day 1)
Software Freedom Day Celebrations at JIIT University (Day 1) -2
Software Freedom Day Celebrations at JIIT University (Day 2)
Software Freedom Day Celebrations at JIIT University (Day 2) -2