The GNU/Linux User Group of Thiagarajar College of Engineering(GLUGOT)[4] was started in Dec.2003 with an objective to promote Free Software and the spirit of co-operation among students of TCE. The group contributes to the community in the form of awareness meetings and sessions. It regularly conducts training programs and technical meetings to teach students on Free Software related technologies. It also caters to the specific needs of students project. TCENet is the FOSS based ERP package developed inhouse to automate the day-to-day activities of the institution. In addition, there are many on-going interdisciplinary research in FOSS. It has been conducting Software Freedom Day (Fstival) from 2004 to educate the college students, school students and general public in and around Madurai. This group also facilitates the meeting of GLUG-Madurai at TCE campus. The group also has a mailing list hosted on the TCE Mailserver. To join the mailing list visit link (http://lists.tce.edu/mailman/listinfo/glugot).

ILUGC is one of the oldest lugs in the country and has been continuously active since it was founded. It keeps a low profile and specialises in grass roots work all around Tamilnadu (and in the neighbouring states too). Under it's guidance, many lugs are active in colleges and towns all around Tamilnadu. At the same time, ILUGC members are in the forefront of the FOSS movement both at the national and international level.

NRC-FOSS, a Central Government Project, funded by the DIT and jointly run by CDAC and AU-KBC, Chennai, for the past two and half years has been actively promoting FOSS in the academic domain. It's main focus has been getting FOSS introduced into the curriculum of Engineering Colleges in the country. Also apart from encouraging student projects in FOSS, it has been active in encouraging academia to release it's work under FOSS/Creative Commons licenses. AU-KBC Research Centre, MIT, Chennai has strengths in NLP, Bio-informatics, Wireless, Cryptography and Embedded computing, much of which uses FOSS tools and has released some of this research as FOSS.