Contemplation

Sunday, December 09, 2007

FOSS.in - 2007


Right from my College days i have been an ardent supporter of GNU/Linux system and OpenSource software. In retrospect, there are a number of factors which has kindled this interest.

First of all being a Computer Science student, i was quite surprised and obviously thrilled in knowing that the source code of an entire Operating System was at our disposal. The concept of "free as in freedom" was a tempting relief from the normally closed/restrictive and greedy attitude that we encounter in our day today life. Moreover all the systems in our college were running Linux, and we were constantly encouraged to try out free software by our Principal - Prof Jyothi John. This obviously led to my first tryst with LINUX. I was also fortunate in having a Linux wizard - Bimal - as my room mate. Right through the entire college days he trouble shooted my installation woes, Network configuration and what not. We even had an opportunity to hear about the harmful effects of Software Patents
from the guru - the iconic Richard M Stallman (RMS) himself - what else can i ask for ?

My current job also gave me some opportunity to tweak with some Linux Related stuff, like experimenting with some kernel modules.

So after all this history i was quite thrilled to attend FOSS.in 2007.
I felt that i shouldn't miss the opportunity to hear from legendary kernel developers. So after some pulling ropes i was permitted to attend the event officially. Though my manager was initially of the opinion that the session's are not directly related to SCM's, he finally relented.

I was surprised at the number of foreigners who were attending the event at least some 10 % of the delegates were foreigners and 90 % of the speakers were foreigners. There were speakers from Red Hat - Alan Morris (SE Linux) , Ulrich Drepper (C Runtime maintainer). IBM 's LTC - The inimitable Rusty Russell (IP Chains , IP Filters - known as Linus' right hand man), SUN Microsystems - Chief Open Source Officer Simon Philipps, Mozilla - including the CEO
Mitchell baker , Harald weite - Open Moko and lot of others. These were the prominent speakers whom i have heard, as the talks were going on in parallel i missed some good ones (like from debian Prolect Lead Sam Hocevar , Open Solaris Lead Jim Grisanzio , then some talks on Real time patches for Kernel etc) . Also attended sessions of some of the Indian speakers - the most prominent being Naba Kumar of Anjuta fame, Abhijit Vichare a researcher from IIT-Bombay who has done elaborate research on GCC internals.

The facility at NSSC (
National Science Symposium Center - Indian Institute of Science - Bangalore, India). was of international standards. The entire venue had WiFi.

No i wont continue my dramatic monologue - here are some of the snaps .


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