NRCFOSS - Are you there ?

What is it?

NRC-FOSS stands for National Resource Center for FOSS. Which is a joint initiative between Anna University Chennai (:o) and C-DAC chennai.It is Funded by Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, Govt. of India.


You wanna more about them go here .

What's their Job?

They are telling, Lack of Manpower in FOSS is one of the major reasons for the Industry not venturing seriously into this area.

(LOL if you keep signing MOU 's with Microsoft for providing students with their free crap then how the manpower in FOSS will increase? See the picture VC is signing the MOU with Microsoft eagerly :P )

So,
They are proposing two plans to improve the manpower in FOSS.

1.The Formal Way:

"Training teachers of Engineering Colleges and equipping them to offer FOSS Electives and student projects in their colleges at the UG/MCA levels as part of the curriculum so as to ensure that large numbers of Engineers and MCA s are produced every year with exposure, training and skills in the FOSS area." (oh really then?)

"In Phase-I extending to the first two years, this would be taken up in Tamil Nadu alone, where 100 teachers from 50 Engineering Colleges would be selected to get trained at the NRCF in teaching and guiding UG (CSE) and MCA students in FOSS. The NRCF, in consultation with the Industry and the Anna University, would develop syllabi for two curricular Electives, and the 100 selected Teachers would be trained in teaching these Electives to the BE/MCA classes during the penultimate semester and the semester prior to it."

(Brother, there are now more than 350 affiliated engineering colleges in tamilnadu alone, you trained them two years back..do you think they are still in teaching profession?

The first training program was conducted in June '2005
http://www.au-kbc.org/nrcf/partinst.htm

List of teachers attended FOSS TTP ( 6th to 18th June 2005 )
http://www.au-kbc.org/nrcf/ttcp.htm

Can NRC-FOSS prove that, any of these colleges using FOSS today at least ?)

Their comedy calculation: [:D]

"It is expected that each of these 50 colleges would offer these electives to a class of at least 60 students every year, so that a minimum of 3000 engineering graduates with FOSS training would be produced every year at the end of this phase. "

( அட பாவிகளா? Do you know in the academic year of 2006-2007 only one college among affiliated colleges took FOSS as their elective and the same college haven't took the elective in 2007-2008 due to unavailability proper books, )

NRC-FOSS people , can you publish the number of colleges who took FOSS as an elective in the past 4 years?

What a pathetic story huh?

One day i visited their irc channel #nrc-foss-edu in irc.freenode.net

And asked them "Students of government schools are using open office in their higher secondary education, but when they come to anna university affiliated college why they are forced to use Microsoft office?"

The answer is: silence

me again,
When anna university will give importance to FOSS ?

Finally a guy called lawgon (?) broke the silence and replied irresponsibly "Who knows?"

I guess he is one of them [:(]

If Anna University and NRC-FOSS really cares about FOSS introduction, then why the new syllabus regulation 2008 still recommends proprietary software?

This is clear evidence for everyone to understand that Anna university has never cared about introducing Free / Open software in regular curriculum replacing proprietary software.

Mr.Uma shankar IAS helped TamilNadu Government and Schools to move towards FOSS, hmm who is for anna university?

இந்த பூனைக்கு மணி கட்ட போவது யாரு?

Do it now:

Let NRC-FOSS stop playing the FOSS Elective Drama and ask Anna University
to propose the use of FOSS based software in Computer Labs and also to remove
all Proprietary Software proposed in Lab Requirements.