Mukund Deshmukh, from Nagpur, has come out with a Perl extension for

an Interactive Voice Response System. Check www.betacomp.com Ivrs works like

this: someone phones a number, the system picks the call and a pre-recorded

message is played out. 24 x 7. Your caller gets a voice menu -- to select

the info wanted. Besides, the caller can feed in his input info (access

code, ID number, etc) through the phone dial-pad. Based on his/her choice,

the relevant voice message is played back. It works in any language.

Sanisoft (www.sanisoft.com

) also from Nagpur, run by paedetrician-turned-software guru Dr Tarique

Sani, offer their WAPpop (GPL

WAP-based POP3 mail client), of_calendar (calendar element for PHPlib's

OOH Forms Library... and RtoD (a Roman-to-Hindi transliterator). RtoD is

functioning at their interesting ghazal site www.aaina-e-ghazal.com

Sani's aaina-e-ghazal.com offers a trilingual dictionary of commonly

used words in 'ghazals'. To enhance the popularity of this site and help the

'ghazals' get a wider reach, the Urdu text is written in Devnagri, the

widely-used script of Hindi and other North Indian languages. The meanings

of the words used in the Ghazals are given in English, Hindi and the regional

language Marathi.

By using a WAP (wireless-access protocol) enabled device, like a phone,

PDA, or palmtops, the software Sani wrote -- which is called WAPpop -- can

read mail from an Internet server, reply or forward mail, even delete mail

and send new messages.

The paedetrician-turned-software guru says he WAPpop still remains the

only Open Source software of its kind in India. It was also the first Open

Source software doing its job listed on prestigious international website

Freshmeat.net when the first version was released in July 2000.

Open Source and Free Software does not mean Linux alone.

There's a Free Software Foundation branch in India, which works out of

Kerala. Last monsoons it was inaugurated amidst a high-profile visit to India

by Richard Stallman, the founder of the global FSF.

Stallman has once said: "The most fundamental way of helping other people

is to teach people how to do things better, to tell people things that you