The Department of Computer Science & Engineering and Information Technology, School of Technology, Assam Don Bosco University organized a two-day Training on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) on 29-30 May 2015. This is an initiative by the university and the department towards the awareness and promoting FOSS.

The primary objective of the training programme was to promote FOSS and make people aware about benefits of FOSS. Linux is a very powerful operating system which includes a multitude of tools for programmers and system administrators. It is heavily used in the academic and scientific communities because it is so versatile, and has over 40 years of development of scientific tools. It is a powerful, robust, stable, and flexible system that allows programmers to tailor the operating system to run on a variety of hardware from phones to supercomputers. There is a wealth of free information about Linux on the web and is also well documented in several books.

FOSS is indeed free. The cost involved is only in the training and implementation. Here too IIT Bombay has pitched in making available free Spoken Tutorials for learning FOSS tools and programming languages. It is in this combination that FOSS wins over proprietary software.

FOSS is easily accessible and customizable subject to your creativity, involvement and expertise. World class experts are approachable for guidance. It’s at negligible cost and creates confidence for entrepreneurship. Most reputed institutes have moved to FOSS.

The training provided an opportunity for the participants to explore new avenues of Linux and FOSS. It had a set of introductory lectures which cover different aspects of Linux and FOSS. The training also included a series of practical sessions which gave exposure to various open source tools.