Aligning with the global celebration of software freedom day (http://softwarefreedomday.org)”>, day which falls in each third Saturday of September , Virtusa Open Source Special Interest Group (VOSSIG) organized a software freedom day event at Virtusa ,Colombo office premises. The event was held from 1 p.m to 5.30 p.m with participation of several geeks presenting and sharing their expertise on FOSS and enthusiastic attendance of Virtusans. I found it really great to be part of the team of organizers of this year’s event.
Attendees of Virtusa SFD 2013
Miffan Careem (Director, Solutions Architecture – WSO2) joined the event briefing about the importance of practicing Free and Open source software development and the value it has added to his career. We also had Suchetha Wijenayake (FOSS advocate, Consultant for Linux/FOSS based services) as a guest speaker of the event and he shared the concepts behind FOSS and it’s history.
We also had Chandika Mendis (Senior Vice President and Global Head of Engineering at Virtusa) and Thushera Kawdawatta (Senior Director of Technology & Chief Software Architect at Virtusa) sharing how Virtusa supports FOSS and uses it’s value within the organization. The initiatives carried out at Virtusa has lead to 2 prominent open source projects Sahana (http://sahanafoundation.org/) and Akura (http://akuraschools.org/). Also Virtusa has it’s own operating system customized for employees , based on Ubuntu named Virtusa OS in which I have been part of once as an intern at Virtusa R&D department. Hence , as was elaborated in the session , there is a lot of enthusiasm at and support from Virtusa towards FOSS development .
Then, there were 2 sessions conducted by VOSSIG team members on Debian packaging and Ethical Hacking . The session ended with a technical discussion with the panel which was conducted by me and a fellow VOSSIG member , Probodha.
It was the first ever software freedom day held at Virtusa and the event ended with a lot of encouraging feedback from the guest panel and the attendees. Hope that enthusiasm will follow in the years to come……..
The VOSSIG team after having a successful SFD 2013 being held at Virtusa
A traveller's story.......... 