About Us
Lanka Software Foundation (LSF) was established in 2003 as a company limited by guarantee and as "not for profit" organization with the following mission and objectives.
- To support open source software developers and projects with infrastructure, funding, motivation, research, development, consultancy, training and other enabling facilities.
- To initiate, establish and implement open software projects.
- To undertake to provide open-source software services.
- To create an identity to the open-source software developer community and provide for worldwide interaction, co-operation and co-ordination of open source software developers.
- To liaise with external agencies and act as a medium to obtain and receive resources, facilities and funds for the development and enhancement of knowledge, education and research with respect to open source software and related fields.
- To organize and promote seminars, workshops, conferences and exhibitions for the purpose of training and dissemination of knowledge.
- To provide bursaries, scholarships, grants, financial assistance and other facilities to students, teachers and lecturers for academic and research studies with respect to open-source software and related fields.
An important dimension of LSF's strategy was to execute a collaborative model between the universities (and other teaching institutes) and the IT industry. The different parties contributed physical infrastructure and human resources as was appropriate in the furtherance of the above-mentioned goals, participating in global open-source projects with LSF as the driving force. LSF provided the vision, the strategy, leadership and guidance for the successful execution of this collaborative endeavor.
The collaborative model, where the universities (and other academic institutions) provided infrastructure and equipment and IT companies the human resources for software development projects driven by LSF, has proved to be a significant success. This is evidenced by the funding obtained for its first project i.e. Apache Axis C++ from Globus and IBM in the USA. The Axis Java project was funded by the Swedish Development Agency (SIDA) and has already made considerable progress in architecting Axis Version 2.0 with the participation of global software leaders in this domain. Thus, LSF has been successful in working within the framework of one of the key brands in the OS domain, the Apache Foundation. LSF participated in two inter interoperability workshops organized by Microsoft and IBM in San Francisco and Texas respectively, to test the inter interoperability of the software developed to the specifications jointly authored by Microsoft and IBM in the web services domain, namely Reliable Messaging and Secure Conversation and Trust. The visibility and the experience gained by LSF and its partners have been considerable and undoubtedly meet the key objective of positioning the Sri Lankan industry in a global context. In executing these projects software engineers from different IT companies sit side by side working as teams, developing open source software. The collaboration between industry firms and the universities in this manner is unprecedented in this country.