Timeline of FOSS in India, initially documented by @Rushabh_Mehta at https://gist.github.com/rmehta/51f814190e59873113d2.
Please free to suggest edits in replies. This document will be updated to incorporate all the edits suggested by the community,
Indian FOSS: Timelines
This is an attempt to cover the history of Indian FOSS
- 1984: Richard Stallman creates GNU
- 1980s: TeX (software in public domain) introduced into Kerala by Prof. K.S.S. Namburipad of the Department of Mathematics in the University of Kerala. Source
- 1991: Linus Torvalds releaes Linux Kernel
- 1996: Atul Chitnis and Kishore Bhargava convince CyberMedia (PC Quest) to distribute Linux CDs. Over a million CDs distributed over a span of 10 years. People stood in queues in front of newstands to get a copy of PCQuest.
- 1998: PCQ swaps Slackware Linux with Red Hat Linux.
- 1998-2000: Linux user groups (LUGs) start forming in all major cities [pending: link
- 1999-2001: IndLinux incubated via FreeOS to kick of Indic Localization
- 2000: IT@School project takes shape in Kerala to promote FOSS in schools in Kerala. Project chaired by Dr U. R. Rao, former head of ISRO
- 2001: FOSS initiative named Freedom First was held in Thiruvananthapuram to promote free software in the country. RMS was the chief guest and FSF India was inaugrated.
- 2001: Linux Bangalore (later FOSS.in) kicks off - one of the biggest FOSS events in Asia promoted by Bangalore LUG
- 2002: Satish Babu out manouvers Oracle to get FOSS win a contract at PWD Kerala
- 2002: Public Demo of Hindi Gnome in Banglore Linux
- 2003: Anna University starts promoting FOSS in colleges in TN, gets join funding with CDAC
- 2004: Linux Asia starts, later becomes OSI Days in 2010
- 2007: BOSS Linux introducted by CDAC / NRC FOSS
- 2008: Prof Phatak, RetHat and ohers successfully convince GoI to not endorse OOXML as an ISO standard
- 2008: GRC Lab setup at IIT-B to work on advanced GCC Internals
- 2009: Phase II of NRCFOSS - expansion in programs
- 2010: Free Software Movement of India founded in Bangalore
- 2012: Last FOSS.IN
- 2013: FSMI stops Technical Education board AICTE from mandating Office356
- 2014: Microsoft ends support for Windows XP - State Govt of Kerala mandates all offices to migrate to Linux
FOSS Communities
Swathanthra Malayalam Computing
Formed in 2002, underwent a revival in 2005-2007 and has been consistently producing FOSS, fonts under open licenses and translations ever since.
BangPypers
BangPypers, the Bangalore Python Usergroup, started by Anand Pillai in 2005.