Show me the Code - Open Source

"Talk is cheap - Show me the Code" - FOSS.in/2008. I derived my headline from FOSS.in.

It has been a very long time I wrote some thing. What was I doing all these days.....?

I was requesting every one to show me their code :)

Here are my thoughts on Open Source -

- What is Open Source?
Show your source

- What is Source?
Effort !!! after putting enormous energy, time and patience one will come up with few lines of code that addresses or solves a problem.

- Are Efforts paid?
Yes, some times Efforts are paid or brought by some one. Some times they are Free.

- When I combine the above ...
Its all about Sharing My Effort...!

- Why do I need to Share some thing that I learnt or developed?
To make it evolve.

While talking to a professor at a college, I told "Students have learnt selfishness for 25 years and on a single day we cannot teach them Sharing"

Our life starts at home, when parent tell their kid not to share there homework to get ranked high at school, Teachers never advice to work collaboratively on a problem as we are ranked based on our answers, College doesn't teach us working together in examination halls. In our entire life we are told to deal with problems on an individual basis, we are asked to hide our efforts to get better name in society. After spending our life on these principles for 25 years, one day HR at an organization asks us "ARE YOU A TEAM PLAYER ?" --

Common on, how can I be a team player, I always solved problems on my own, never learnt using efforts of others, or sharing my own efforts. How can you expect me to be a team player?

Open Source,
- is not giving your lines of code to some one when you don't need any more,
- is not publishing 1000s of lines on a single day and asking others to work on the same
- is not about disclosing your source for free
- is not about teaching or building expertize on your work

It is all about solving problems collaboratively. If you forget collaborating, then the opened source of yours is of no use.

Openess enables Innovation, Innovation solves problems and Gives credit for what you are called "an engineer..."

Enjoy Open Source Solutions at http://beagleboard.org/ ...!

Free Embedded Linux Training for Students in India

Title : Open “Embedded Linux” Software Development with Beagleboard.org
Date : 20th September 2008 (Saturday)
Venue : IISc, CEDT Seminar Hall, Bangalore

Registration : Free for First 100 members

Time	Topic
09:30	What, why, who, and how of open source
10:30	Quick overview of the Beagle Board
11:00	How does Beagleboard.org help students & startups in India
11:30	Break
12:00	Q &A and Discuss lab setup to boot Linux on beagleboard
01:00	Lab #1 (Build and Boot Linux)
01:45	Lunch
02:30	Validation Procedure for Peripherals on Beagle Board
03:00	Participating and Contributing to Open Community
04:00	Open discussion

Agenda:

• Enable Students in India to develop s/w on embedded devices with Open Community.
• Training students in using the embedded platform for s/w development
• Give a big picture of what’s going on in the industry with Open Platforms.
• Benefits of working with Open Community and beagleboard.org in particular.

Audience & expertise:

• Students (2nd / 3rd year preferable) with very minimal knowledge of Linux,
• Students who are passionate about Open Source Linux kernel and s/w development for embedded platforms.

Registration:

• Through mail (khasim@beagleboard.org) with subject as “[OSDB] Attendee OSD Beagleboard at IISc 20-Sept-08”.
• Please mention College and Course undergoing.

Please NOTE this event is organized for “Students ONLY”

Embedded Linux Development Platform in India

Last week I did a bit of research on what exactly an open platform like beageboard did mean to India.

With some simple queries on google.co.in I found lots of forums, mailing lists, groups, publications for Linux meant exclusively for India. I found some good articles on what open community means in India like http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=47900215, it shows that open source principles and concepts are not new to India.

Going forward I was wondering about the current state of open source, I found another blog http://osindia.blogspot.com which was kind of upto date. The author is capturing really good amount of data here. Moving forward I found group for Simputer that has 2343 active members and the handheld concept being driven in early 2001 itself. I found some info on SBCs developed in early 2001 to 2003 from various companies in India like iWave’s SBC on MPC860, 8260, ARM etc. I realized that embedded Linux development platforms were locally available for developers, startups in India.

I then changed my focus to Universities & Students, I was just amazed to find every top colleges being equipped with an embedded systems lab with embedded platforms from TI, Intel, and many other sources. There are trainings available from range of institutions for embedded devices and Linux in particular.

I then thought of identifying gaps in previous offerings made to Indian customer base (students and organizations) for embedded Linux platforms and for open source concepts in particular.

Just thought of listing few below:

• The packaging was bit difficult to handle, the distribution was just one time in a CD, no improvements.
• The hardware was low cost but software stack was priced high.
• Sometimes software was free but hardware was not generic enough to explore
• At times both hardware and software were bit expensive to handle.
• The software was just basic and calls for a hard development to explore high end applications like multimedia applications
• When total cost was low, the support didn’t exist at all.
• Though University and students had access to hardware, they were given very less exposure to innovative concepts for the platform
• Student’s work on a platform didn’t fetch them any credit, exposure, money in any form.
• Work done by a student was dropped half way and was not provided with other means to carry it forward after completing the course.

There are many such issues that I can list, but overall I feel we have fixed/addressed most of them with beagleboard.org. Few simple pointers,

Beagleboard.org for Indian startups and organizations:

• Explore new areas of research in the field of MIDs, Portable navigations, Mobile Devices and applications, Gaming, Medical, Home Security etc
• Prototype their innovative thought on highest performance ARM, DSP C64x+, 2D/3D graphics accelerator.
• Develop with latest software : Many Thanks to beagle community members.
• Always upto date software stack: Again thanks to community members.
• Almost complete software stack for various segments/ domains like multimedia devices, etc.

Beagleboard.org for Indian students and universities:

• A low cost affordable hardware for just Rs 9999/-.
• Learn from Open Community
• Understand and explore open standards like OpenGL, OpenMax, OpenCV, gStreamer, etc
• A forum to showcase their thought, develop with global community, maintain it even after completion of their course.

A short message before concluding, Ideas are just like raw materials they need enormous energy or effort, tools, etc to convert it into a finished product, but if energy or effort is shared and tools are made openly available to all then it just needs a motivation to convert an idea into an innovative product. Beagleboard.org is one such initiative that enables innovation, gives us a forum to express our ideas and share our thoughts & efforts globally, and helps us in converting a simple idea into an innovative product to address a global need.

Visit http://beagleboard.org

Happy Learning….

Khasim

khasim@beagleboard.org

Are we really innovating?

Don’t know why but since few days I am asking this question to my self and to many. The answer I get is bit strange…

To start with what is an innovation? A solution to a common problem (addresses the need) that is accepted globally may be?

While I was in school we used to read lot of books on quiz and innovations and if you have noticed there used to be lot of discoveries in 18^th century and early 19^th as well, but after mid 19^th century they have dropped considerably

Does this mean we have stopped innovating? No way:

• Daily there are tons of concepts, ideas and thoughts floating around every area of research.
• The amount of investment in terms of money, time, effort on research has grown drastically over recent years
• Every year there are 100s of new products getting launched in all segments.
• So many patents being filed every year.

But why don’t we call them as innovation? Why are they not getting into regular books that we used to read?

An answer given by one of my favorite was “we have to wait till we call them as innovation, may be after some years we will treat these as achievements/innovations”

The one that I believe in is “We are sharing an innovation” – there is no longer a single person involved in innovation. The technology is growing exponentially, an idea needs lot of effort to turn it into a solution for our problem.

To dig more: My favorite innovation is Electric Lamp from Thomas A Edison, if I do some self reasoning, I enter into following questions and self answers

• What made him invent Electric Lamp? --- Need?
• He had other energies like Solar, Hydro, etc then why Electricity? --- Accessibility and feasibility may be?
• Was he aware that there was this energy in electricity that can produce Light? Yes, amazing?
• If he had used other sources of energy, would that have been a right choice? No, the innovation might have been deprecated by now.
• How this innovation reached all corners of earth? Today we spend so much on marketing, how did this get marketed? --- May be Common Need of people across the world and demand than some one pushing to accept it.

If I summarize this innovation, it has

- Broader community to accept it as innovation – A global cause/need

- It is be feasible to adopt in any circumstances

- It presents a road map to improve till date

- It is mobile in general, I can carry it where ever I move.

- Not bound to specific area of interest.

Overall – he understood the energy and drove it in a direction that gave a solution for the problem called "Darkness.."

I think this is what we miss today, there are lots of common problems and there are various sources of energies - we need to find right energy to find a right solution.

Unless we do this we cannot call any thing that we do as an innovation….

A quick hint:

Try http://beagleboard.org, it has enormous energy in terms of man power, inventory, intelligence, documentation, awareness, forum to showcase your abilities and capabilities and more over we have lot of global problems to solve…. With this energy if you can find a solution to one of the existing global problems then you are the next - Edison.

Good Luck

Khasim…!

All excited with Beagle release getting closer...

Some time last year I was probing some TV-out issue on OMAP 2430 boards with Steve K. Gerald Coley walked in and started collecting inputs on software requirements for a 99$ board. I had not seen him before, I was wondering how can a board be made at 99$ that too on a processor like OMAP. I just continued with my debugging, when steve K asked me if I have any further inputs. I said, what ever board it is I need a UART port. Gerald nodded his cute head and left the cubicle.

After few months, I was introduced to this board called "Beagle" priced at 149$ by Jason K, then I saw Gerald C explaining about the board with a small printout. I was really amazed... Can you believe this? If I remember I had asked for a UART and look at this 3" by 3" (inch) board... it has DVI, NAND, S-Video, MMC/SD/SDIO, my favourite UART, USB HOST, USB OTG, AUDIO OUT, AUDIO IN, JTAG connector, DDR. More than these, it has OMAP3 on it - which is a beast in processing and a lame lamb in Power requirements.

For a person like me who has seen OMAP on boards like H2, H3, H4, SDPs and innovators this was something that I can ever think of.

I started working on Linux porting for this board, our REV1 was not so sucessful but did work for many devices, Gerald and Jason were confident of making another rev. I was just working on other boards and with in a month or so Gerald comes with the dark orange board, this time the board just worked ... I got wonderful support from Steve K (USB OTG), Jeff (remote debugging) and Daren (for u-boot logo)... this took me into a new world.

Then what next? I had never worked with Jason K before, he always talks so politely that you can't even predict what is his next move, with in few days he got a rocking webpage. We worked on creating logo, with the help of Michael Sandoval and others, we started preparing brochures, wikis, demos etc. Jason took this small dream of Gerald to a state beyond my imagination,

Slowly we started discussing with community and in no time we found greatest and the best contributors like Dirk Behme, Steve sakoman, Nishanth Menon, Koen, Philip, DS2, and so many on Beagle IRC ... (who ever is reading and does not find their name... sorry about that it is just an example). Community just started contributing with out a single line support from us.

With in months time we had Angstrom running with OE builds, ubuntu, SGX and DSP codec demos and can you believe it Mans got 720p MPEG4 DEMO running on ARM Cortex A8...

With worldwide support we have successfully demostrated beagle at multiple conferences.

But the day is getting nearer when we will be (ia) announcing the availability of this board or our dream to world. In couple of weeks from now boards should be available for all....

Till here it was a tough journey but today we have a beautiful and strong community around us to support the initiative called beagleboard.org.

Learn more about this initiative at BeagleBoard.org, there are cool videos of Jason to present our views and ideas on BeagleBoard and open source in general.

Let me sleep now, tommorow I have to complete the wiki with new set of validation procedures for BeagleBoard, all is set just have to upload the images and write the wiki page.

I am just proud as I am innovating with BeagleBoard.org.

Coming soon....

Are we really innovating today?

Let me re-start

I always thought I can code well given an opportunity I can talk as well. But for some reason I didn't like to write except lengthy mails that some how irritates my managers :).

I always thought my writing is very exhaustive and doesn't get completed in few lines. So, never gave a try with blog.

Moreover I was not having a strong reason to really tell some thing additional to what I do on Linux mailing lists ... But today I feel there is some thing to write and to communicate...

Very recently people have started asking me my blog details, who ever I meet the general question is do you blog? where? why don't you write all these that you just mentioned?

Hmmm...

So the blog that was dead is re-visited - not just because every one is asking but I have lots to say now...

.... watch out for more in coming days...