Called the Red Hat Scholarships - the Open Source Challenge, the programme is open to students from engineering colleges across India, and carries scholarships of Rs 10 lakh. The programme will be conducted jointly with the Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology at IIT Bombay.

The advisory board for the Red Hat Scholarships has Dr D B Phatak, founder of the Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology at IIT Bombay, Prof S Sadagopan, director of the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, and Rajesh Jain, director of Netcore Solutions and others as its members.

According to Javed Tapia, director, Red Hat India, the objective of Red Hat Scholarships is to reach out to Linux enthusiasts in engineering colleges across India and to encourage the adoption of the open source philosophy.

Open Source is a worldwide movement that consists of people across the world collaborating over the internet to develop software. The software thus developed is usually distributed under the general public license that allows other users to see its code and modify it.

Since these software programs developed by open source enthusiasts can be copied for free, they hold enormous relevance for developing countries where software prices are generally priced beyond the reach of the common man.

According to the company, President, A P J Abdul Kalam has also endorsed open source software and held it up as an example of technology that can benefit India''s one billion population. The Red Hat scholarship programme carries a special award for the best participating team from rural colleges.

Red Hat India has committed itself to helping the participants with software and support staff, which will be dedicated to the contest. According to the company, all software submitted to the Red Hat scholarship programme will be in the public domain under one of the popular open source licences such as GPL, LGPL, and BSD. The company has also said that, in addition, deserving participants would be offered national and international internships with Red Hat and its affiliate companies.

Eligibility details available on www.in.redhat.com