FOSS is Free and Open Source Software. I had a long deprived desire to contribute to the Open Source world. But all I did before 3-4 months, was just to use open-source. I switched my OS to Fedora one year ago. On 20th December 2009 my desire went beyond its upper bound and I searched on google "how to contribute to open source". I found a lot of information but one advice seemed to be the easiest and I chose it. It was "If you want to contribute to the open source then at first you should use it as much as possible." Hence I switched to Fedora officially for almost all of my work.
During my Information Retrieval course I used to use a lot of Open Source academic softwares and that added more respect for FOSS and so the desire to contribute got even bigger. But ideally I couldn't pay much back. Then on 29th Macrh 2011 there was a mail from Paolo [my to be Ph.D. advisor] about Xapian Search Engine Library about their participation in Google Summer of Codes 2011. As I love something related to Information Retrieval I right away started investigating about the whole program and what it is. I learnt that its a great initiative by Google in order to turn more students towards Open Source and to cultivate the knowledge base. I learnt on the very day that last day to submit the application was 8th April means merely 10 days left! I went on #xapian IRC channel which was going to be my life for next 4 months and threw some random questions. Soon there was a reply from Olly a.k.a ojwb [an uber cool geek] for my questions and I was told that still there is a room to discuss the possibility of a new project.
That day itself I thought that Learning-to-Rank can be a great project for Xapian as I have done a lot of research on the topic for my M.Tech thesis. I have used many such search engine libraries like Terrier, Lemur etc but they don't have Learning-to-Rank support. So I went on discussing the project with them and this time there was Richard Boulton a.k.a rboulton [Yet another yet effective Geek] who was going to be my Primary Mentor for the project. They asked me to submit an official proposal for the further discussion. That way it all started. Mostly on 28th August 2011 Xapian is going to be the first open source search engine library with Learning to Rank support in the world. On 25th of April this year the list of selected GSoC students published and my name was there too. It was an overwhelming moment.
At that particular time I was much occupied in my thesis work and hence most of the time during "Community Bonding" period I was working on my thesis and in the later half I started my project for Xapain. I quickly learnt there are quite a few weapons which help you to do good like, SVN, GIT, GNU automake, bugzilla, doxygen etc. So I issued a book from library on them and started my flight. I chose svn for version control repository [git might had been a sane option which I am planning to learn soon] .
Just two weeks before, Mid-term evaluation has got over and I am on my schedule to finish the project. It is such a great feeling - a feeling of self satisfaction that I could give something back to the community who makes a lot of interesting things for the world to use for free. It truly reminds me about the line of movie Antitrust "The knowledge belongs to the world!". GSoC has actually given me a birth in FOSS world and I feel like living there very long.
During my Information Retrieval course I used to use a lot of Open Source academic softwares and that added more respect for FOSS and so the desire to contribute got even bigger. But ideally I couldn't pay much back. Then on 29th Macrh 2011 there was a mail from Paolo [my to be Ph.D. advisor] about Xapian Search Engine Library about their participation in Google Summer of Codes 2011. As I love something related to Information Retrieval I right away started investigating about the whole program and what it is. I learnt that its a great initiative by Google in order to turn more students towards Open Source and to cultivate the knowledge base. I learnt on the very day that last day to submit the application was 8th April means merely 10 days left! I went on #xapian IRC channel which was going to be my life for next 4 months and threw some random questions. Soon there was a reply from Olly a.k.a ojwb [an uber cool geek] for my questions and I was told that still there is a room to discuss the possibility of a new project.
That day itself I thought that Learning-to-Rank can be a great project for Xapian as I have done a lot of research on the topic for my M.Tech thesis. I have used many such search engine libraries like Terrier, Lemur etc but they don't have Learning-to-Rank support. So I went on discussing the project with them and this time there was Richard Boulton a.k.a rboulton [Yet another yet effective Geek] who was going to be my Primary Mentor for the project. They asked me to submit an official proposal for the further discussion. That way it all started. Mostly on 28th August 2011 Xapian is going to be the first open source search engine library with Learning to Rank support in the world. On 25th of April this year the list of selected GSoC students published and my name was there too. It was an overwhelming moment.
At that particular time I was much occupied in my thesis work and hence most of the time during "Community Bonding" period I was working on my thesis and in the later half I started my project for Xapain. I quickly learnt there are quite a few weapons which help you to do good like, SVN, GIT, GNU automake, bugzilla, doxygen etc. So I issued a book from library on them and started my flight. I chose svn for version control repository [git might had been a sane option which I am planning to learn soon] .
Just two weeks before, Mid-term evaluation has got over and I am on my schedule to finish the project. It is such a great feeling - a feeling of self satisfaction that I could give something back to the community who makes a lot of interesting things for the world to use for free. It truly reminds me about the line of movie Antitrust "The knowledge belongs to the world!". GSoC has actually given me a birth in FOSS world and I feel like living there very long.
