(LEAD)
By Frederick Noronha, Indo-Asian News Service

Bangalore, March 11 (IANS) The Simputer project, struggling against
odds, has open sourced one of its prominent software - in a move which
could see many more techies playing around with the self-contained
handheld computer project and contributing to it.

Alchemy - the user interface used on the Amida Simputer - has been
open sourced, and the code has been released under the General Public
License.

"Several people have started actively working on it, including some
well-known names outside India," announced Atul Chitnis, senior vice
president of product technology and strategy of Geodesic Information
Systems Ltd.

The Simputer is a self-contained, sharable and handheld computer,
designed for situations where personal computers were inapt. Due to
the low cost, and the attempt to make it sharable, it was also seen as
useful to bring computing power to the "developing" countries.

Born in Bangalore, the Simputer project evoked a huge interest across
the globe in recent years, though the project failed to make the
impact it was expected to earlier. Efforts are still underway though
to build on the project.

By "open sourcing" the code, it would mean that the software would be
made available to the general public with either relaxed or
non-existent intellectual property restrictions.

Open sourcing of software projects is seen as beneficial as it enables
users to build or improve user-generated software through incremental
individual effort, or collaboration.

Explained Chitnis: "Every time I have shown the Simputer to people
abroad, the first thing people have commented on was the interface,
and have asked if it was possible to make the code available."

Said he: "There is a lot of work to be done, and if you ever wanted to
get involved with a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) project, this
would be a good way to start. And since the port going on is to the
OpenEmbedded platform, you would actually be involved with both
projects."

openalchemy.org is part of the Amida Simputer project, one of the two
initiatives that worked on building different versions of the
Simputer.

PicoPeta (the company formed by the IISc professors who actually
developed the Simputer) merged with Geodesic, that is providing funds
and other support the project previously fell short of.

Encore, the other Simputer licensee, is now focussed on another device
called the "anywhere computing tool" Mobilis. It had earlier announced
what it called the "world's first integrated battle computer" SATHI
(Situation Awareness and Tactical Handheld Information).

Amida Alchemy (or OpenAlchemy, its open-sourced version) is optimised
for mobile computing devices. It was conceived in 2003 and was
unveiled as part of the retail launch of the Amida Simputer in 2004 by
PicoPeta Simputers.

Alchemy was created after an evaluation of the then (2003) available
UI (user-interface) layers, window managers and APIs for GNU/Linux
(the Free and Open Source computer operating system), which were not
very suitable.

Amida Alchemy was conceptualised by V. Vinay and built up on by many
other contributors. Alchemy's stress is on providing users of mobile
devices, natural interfaces including handwriting, direct manipulation
and gesture inputs.

Indo-Asian News Service

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