The Centre for Open-source Software and Hardware (COSH) at NITK Surathkal was established with a simple but important goal: to answer the question that many students, faculty members, and organizations struggle with: "How do I get started with open source?". This talk will share the journey of building COSH as one of India's first dedicated academic centers focused on open-source software and hardware, and how it evolved from an institutional initiative into a thriving community of contributors, maintainers, researchers, and industry collaborators.
The talk will discuss the strategies, challenges, and lessons learned while fostering a hacker and open-source culture within an Indian academic institution. It will cover how COSH helps newcomers take their first steps in open source, guides them through making meaningful contributions, and supports participation in flagship programs such as Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Linux Foundation mentorship initiatives. Several students have grown into maintainers of open-source projects and modules, as well as mentors and organization administrators in programs such as GSoC.
The resulting ecosystem has enabled students and faculty to contribute to projects with real-world impact, including the migration of NITK's campus network of more than 40,000 devices to IPv6, the development of a network emulation platform adopted by multiple industries, contributions to packet scheduling algorithms that are now part of the Linux networking stack, and the development of the quantum networking module in ns-3. Notably, nearly half of these open-source initiatives have been supported by industry and research funding.
