Red Hat Scholarships is the first ever open source program of its kind in the world designed to encourage young talent and spread the open source philosophy that has created world class software like Linux, Apache and many other programs.

Open Source is a philosophy that is based on collaboration, community and the collective ownership of intellectual property. Under the Red Hat Scholarships program, we aim to connect students with mentors from the world of open source software so that they get practical exposure in software development. The challenges outlined under this program are based on practical, real-life problems that are of importance to the global open source community. The experience of participating in Red Hat Scholarships will therefore help the students when they graduate and become part of the information technology industry.

This is the third consecutive year that the Red Hat Scholarships program is being run. This program will be a recurring, annual event. Under this program, awards worth Rs 10 lakhs will be distributed to the winning teams.

To participate in the program, students will have to develop a piece of high quality open source software. The projects submitted to Red Hat Scholarships are expected to have effort contribution similar to that of a typical final year BE/BTech project. Group projects are admissible provided a group does not consist of more than five students, each student of the group has identifiable contributions, and the total visible effort is commensurate with the number of students in the group. In the event of a group winning the scholarship, the scholarship amount will be divided equally amongst all group members. In addition deserving participants would be offered national and international internships with Red Hat.

So this is your chance ! Participate in Red Hat Scholarships.

An eminent panel of thought leaders including Dr. D. B. Phatak founder of the Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology at IIT Bombay; Prof. Ashoke Ranjan Thakur, Vice Chancellor, West Bengal University of Technology; Prof. Gautam Barua, director of IIT Guwahati and others from the Advisory Board for Red Hat Scholarships.

B.E, B.Tech, B.Sc(IT, Comp. Science), B.C.A., M.C.A., M.Sc.(IT, Comp. Science), M.B.A.(systems/IT), M.C.M. and M.Tech students from universities of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Srilanka and Bhutan can participate. Participants can be individuals or a team of maximum FIVE students per team.

The objective of the Red Hat scholarships is to speed up the adoption of open source software in India and make India a proud contributor to the global open source community. Eight challenges have been decided by the organizers of the scholarship and we are also open to suggestions that meet our objectives listed above. Suggestions can be uploaded at the time of registration or e-mailed to us at rhscholarships@redhat.com

The challenges are:

1. Open Source localization in Indian languages
2. Development of open source Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) frameworks
3. Meaningful applications for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) e.g. MiniERP, Accounting and microcredit applications
4. Geographical Information Systems
5. Embedded Linux and associated applications for Net appliances e.g. smart cards, cell phones, handled PDAs, general appliances etc.
6. Audio/Video applications like VoIP, Internet telephony, feature recognition, text-to-speech etc.
7. Network related e.g. protocols, security etc.
8. System software and tools. e.g. Linux extensions, open source databases, and their functionality extensions, software development environments.

Each participant / team has to submit a proposal for the project along with bonafide certificates from their colleges. The proposals along with the scanned copy of your bonafide certificate can be uploaded after you have registered online.

Registration and submission of project proposals
Submission of Software Requirement Specification
Submission of Software Design Specification
Submission of final code

Please submit the following details regarding your project:

1. A brief summary of the challenge being addressed; what kind of software is being developed and why.
2. How will it contribute to speeding up the adoption of open source software in India and/or contribute to the global open source community .
3. What are the references being used (e.g. books, web sites etc).
4. Who are the team members, contact details etc.
5. Where is the project being hosted (sourceforge.net, sarovar.org etc).
6. The plan for achieving the goals within the deadline.

Participants can create their own projects on Sourceforge (www.sourceforge.net) or join existing open source projects. Review of the project will be based on a study of the original code developed, amount of code accepted or rejected by the project etc. The software submitted will be evaluated on the following criteria

1. Quality of the project proposal submitted to Red Hat Scholarships.
2. Overall value of the project to the open source community in India and abroad.
3. Innovativeness of the software developed.
4. Quality of code, documentation etc.

Red Hat will offer online support to the contestants and also offer download site for tools and software programs. If necessary, copies of Fedora etc can also be shipped to contestants by CDs sent through post/courier.

1. All applicants must be bonafide students of a college located in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Srilanka or Bhutan. Students who are found not to meet this criteria will be immediately disqualified.
2. The decision of the Advisory Board and Red Hat will be final and binding on all participants
3. The code that is submitted must be original code written by the individuals or teams. Those who violate this rule will be immediately disqualified.
4. All software submitted to the Red Hat Scholarships program will be in the public domain under one of the popular Open Source Licenses such as GPL, LGPL, BSD, etc., so that it can benefit the entire community. The nature of the license will be decided by Red Hat and the advisory board.