Programmers make Gujarati Operating System a reality

Kartik Mistry,an IT professional from Ahmedabad and the founding member of the Linux users’ group said: “Utkarsh is a mission to ensure that the benefits of IT reaches every Gujarati through a local language interface and easy to understand software. We developed Utkarsh in 2004 and kept adding various elements to it with the help of several programmers spread across the state and country.”

Meanwhile,Jigish Gohil,a Vadodara-based IT consultant has taken a step further and has assembled Open Suse,another Linux-based OS with the help of around 1,000 programmers across the world to create an OS that can operate in 100-odd languages,including Gujarati.

“All the major components adapt to the languages available at the click of a mouse. The installation is quick and for free,” said Gohil,who won the award of Top 20 contributors for Open Source.

Gohil had developed the OS that could be run from nodal computers if installed in a powerful server.

“There is no need for separate installation. The DOS just needs a powerful server,” said Gohil,who is also a visiting faculty to M S University’s IT Department.

Meanwhile,Mistry said that among the most important features of Utkarsh is the Gujarati dictionary by prominent UK-based industrialist Ratilal Chandaria. “For the last 20 years,Chandaria did painstaking research to prepare the dictionary,which we have included in Utkarsh’s database. It consists of approximately 1,163,292 words for explaining 1,49,709 Gujarati words with their meaning specified with their grammatical forms,” he added.

Ahmedabad company launches open source logging,reporting solution
Even as the state government is yet to decide if it should go for open source software for official use,an Ahmedabad-based company,Elitcore Technologies,has come up with an open source logging and reporting solution to harness the potential of students.

The company wants students to be industry ready when they come out of colleges.

Elitcore,a unified threat management solutions company,will also be able to bring customisation of the solution through the developer communities and students.

“iView ensures the availability of practical use projects that enhance students’ skills and prepares them for the industry on completion of their academics. Besides,it will tap the developer community in India and abroad,” said Abhilash Sonwane,vice-president,Product Management,Cyberoam.

The developer community and organisations are free to download iView from sourceforge.net. “iView is contribution to the open source community and is an appreciation of the principles of sharing and openness that the community stands for,” said Sonawne.

“iView eliminates the need for large capital outlays while delivering security management,regulatory compliance and forensic analysis,” he added.

According to leading analysts,the open source industry is expected to reach 8.1 billion dollars by 2013,with a growth rate of 22.4 per cent. As open source finds increasing acceptance due to a stable community presence and rapid enhancements,it is predicted to expand its presence within organisations.

The organisations are forced to deploy expensive and complex logging-reporting solutions to achieve centralised visibility into network activity for high security,data confidentiality and meeting the requirements of regulatory compliance.

With the rise in insider threats and the consequent rise in security breaches and regulatory compliance requirements,the company saw a broader need for user-centric reporting beyond Cyberoam’s own unified threat management (UTM) security.

The market for this segment,popularly known as Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) is estimated at1.3 billion dollars,growing at over 25 per cent annually. — ENS