Thilina Gunarathne

Go Mora!!!

Wow. This is super cool. University of Moratuwa,where I did my undergrad studies had the most number of Google Summer of Code 2008 applicants and the most number of accepted proposals. Congratulations to all the summer of code award winners from Mora and to the driving forces behind, Dr. Sanjiava Weerawarana & Ms. Vishaka Nanayakkara. According to the sources 18 out of 24 students are from my old department .

At this moment I'm very proud to be among the first set of Sri Lankan GSOC 2005 winners, together with Dinesh, Chathura and Indika. All four of us continued our contributions to OSS and became Apache committers and went further to become PMC members in various Apache projects giving a proof to the long term positive effects of GSOC. After the first GSOC we tried our best to do our share of promoting OSS & GSOC in Sri Lanka by word of mouth as well as by organising promotion meetings. It soooo nice when we hear that our younger generation is continuing the tradition. Keep up the great work !!!!

For those of you who wonder, Sri Lanka is a pioneer in OSS contributions in Asia. Sri Lanka has produced a huge number Apache committers, which I believe is the most from a country outside US & Europe. Most of these committers are from the University of Moratuwa. Apart from Apache, we can see Sri lankan contributors in many other OSS projects including our own Sahana. Full credit for this large number of OSS contributions in Sri Lanka should go to LSF, WSO2 and their founder Dr.Sanjiva Weerawarana.