foss.in 2006

FOSS.IN is one of the largest and most focussed FOSS events held annually India. Over the years, it has attracted thousands of participants, and the speakers are FOSS contributors from across the world. This year, in foss.in 2006, NRCFOSS was a Silver Sponsor and also participated in the event. This year, foss.in was held between 24th November to 26th November, 2006.

Feedbacks and Post-Event Reports

A team of 10, headed by Dr.Srinivisan participated in foss.in 2006. The following are the feedbacks from various participants and members of NRCFOSS about foss.in 2006.

[ Please write your name as heading (heading3 : use ===) and follow it with your write up ]

Parthan

foss.in 2006 is one of the best FOSS conferences I have attended so far, in terms of the talks, the people who made the talks and other activities which happened along side the event. It was a wonderful opportunity to get acquainted with FOSS people from India and abroad. Also, meeting key developers and contributors to Indian and Global FOSS world was indeed exciting.

Day 1:

The day started with a brief opening ceremony, with lighting up of the 'kuthuvelaikku' by representatives from around India. It was followed by an opening keynote address by Suparna Bhattacharya of IBM on 'Linux and the art of minimalistic development. She spoke about her experience as a Kernel Developer as well as the minimalistic approach adopted by the Linux Kernel Developers for better kernel code.

The next talk I attended was 'Web Development in Common Lisp' by Vamsee Kanakala, who gave a walk through on developing an Event Calender Web app using Lisp programming.

The best talk of the day would be 'Solving fundamental structural problem of free software movement' by Andrew Cowie, which was also the closing key note address of the day. The main points which Andrew touched were,

* GNOME vs KDE ( Freedesktop.org is a solution, GNOME KDE cooperation) * Dead projects (115000 out of 135000 projects are dead) * Why hard to co-operate ? --> contributing is hard. * Version control debate - 1st generation: CVS, SVN; 2nd generation: Arch, Monotone, SVK, Darcs; 3rd generation: GIT, Bazaar-NG, Mercurial * Bug tracking tools - crores (is launch pad open source? No) * Suggestion: Have a bug tracking client-server system such as version control. * crazy tents happen in blue tents - bar camps/ hack camps. * Build tools : 1. make 2. autoconf+make 3. automake+autoconf+make 4. automake+autoconf+make+libtool --> (solution) buildtool

Day 2:

The day started with Aaron Seigo, a leading KDE developer, talking about KDE4. It dealt with new things going to be available with KDE4 which seems to be really exciting. I got the chance to be around with Aaron, we talked about activities of NRCFOSS and he had few suggestions regarding the Electives syllabus as well. We also talked about current status of KDE, localization efforts, etc. We also got introduced to VTK Designer, which is a cool designer tool for designing GUIs.

We had a KDE-In BoF followed by 'FOSS in Education' BoF. The following where discussed in the second BoF,

* Computer education in schools, initiatives taken by some individuals around Bangalore. * Approaching and training the faculties. * Experience in Kerala, by Vimal * Where can the help come from, for implementing FOSS in educational field. * It was accepted that, students should be exposed to computers through teachers, rather than allowing to use them computers first hand. * The other unanimous idea was, primary school children, high school children and college students need to be concentrated separately. * We need to develop a team of people who can go around and talk to managements/faculties of educational institutions. * Is connectivity a constrain ? * Do students have enough freedom to pursue their interests in education institutions, especially colleges ? * Role of LUGs in this endeavor.

The closing keynote for the day, was a panel interview of well known faces of Indian FOSS arena. It was a discussion about how it was, how it is and how its going to be /got to be ? (it as in FOSS community)

Day 3:

The day started with a keynote by Sunil Abraham about impact of Indian Copyright and Patent Law on FOSS. A number of people from audience had an active participation in the discussion and the talk was really informative about Indian government's stance on Patents and Copyright laws with respect to FOSS.

I then attended Kartik Mistry's talk about 'How to become Indian Debian Developer' where he talked about contributing to Debian. Next talk was Janabhaarathii project from CDAC Mumbai by Priti Patil. Then it was KDE4 development workshop by Aaron Seigo, where he explained how to write KDE apps, what are the tools, where to get help etc. The last talk to attend before the final closing keynote was Sirtaj Singh's Qt Graphics View.

The best talk of foss.in 2006 was the closing keynote by Tim Pritlove of Chaos Computer Club. This brought before the eyes of the audience, the life style of Hackers, the misconception of the term Hacker, the activities of CCC, what we as FOSS community need to do and many more. There were three really mind blowing video clips played. I am waiting for the presentation and video clipping of the talk to be posted :D

Thus, the curtain fell over foss.in 2006 leaving a very valuable experience with us. The 3 days were really worth an experience, meeting people we may not otherwise meet in person, hearing to some really good and informative talks, and many more to say.

Hope all the others from NRCFOSS who made it to foss.in 2006 have similar experience :)

Syed Nawaz

This was a great experience.

I attended a Tutorial on "Load Balancing" by Sulamita Garcia. It was a live demo of setting up a cluster. She used the laptops of the audience and setup the cluster. It was tested by the audience and technical issues raised while configuring were resolved in very efficient way.

I also attended the talk by Kushal Das on "Inside the Fedora Extras". It was a really a good talk, he explained the procedure for becoming a fedora developer. He explained how to get the sponsor, how to search for the packages before developing them if they were already developed. How to update/submit the package to the fedora community.

I attended the talk by "Priti Patil" of CDAC on "Janabharathi, Localization of languages". It was just a slide show, and it appeared to me as if she was teaching English. As she used to read a sentence from the slide and tried to explain it in a simple English.

I attended the talk by Sunil Abraham on "Impact of Indian copy right and patents laws on foss", there he explained the various laws, and also explained the back-doors of escaping if we get caught using a pirated proprietary software, by telling them that we are doing Research, Making a Backup, Reverse Engg, etc..

I also attended the workshop by Chandra of Google on "Hacking the Slug", It was a nice workshop he tried to maintain the audience concentration all the way, however he could not show the demo of installing the slug. He stated that he is trying a new procedure for installing and at last he was not successful in the new procedure he tried to install..

These are the some of the topics i attended. It was a really nice experience.

Ponnusamy A

This was the first conference that I attended(foss.in 2006).I learned many things and I also interacted with many people from the FOSS community.I shared my knowledge with them.I think this conference was excellent for all the people (proffesionals and newbies alike).I attended many more seminars. Here I share a few things:

Aaron Seigo(https://foss.in/2006/cfp/speakers/talkdetailspub.php?talkid=89) gave an excellent talk on

1.KDE 4 & you 2.Writing applications with KDE.

His speech was wounderful. He talked about Qt4,KDE4(now 3.5) and more new tools in KDE(Oxygen,Solid,Phonon,Decibal,Akonadi,Sonnet,Threadweaver,Strigi) & www.freedektop.org.

I attented PANEL: Ten years of Linux in India(https://foss.in/2006/cfp/speakers/talkdetailspub.php?talkid=219) 9 members discussed about foss. It was very interesting. The talk focussed on Linux and FOSS in India for the past 10 years, what are the positive and negative elements in linux. Students come eagarly but when they get a job, they leave from foss and forget FOSS.

What makes a valuable contributor: social dynamics in F/LOSS (https://foss.in/2006/cfp/speakers/talkdetailspub.php?talkid=220).This talk focussed on the best contributor, what should be done and what should't be done.

Ten Tips To Turbocharge The Team: Getting Smaller User-Groups Moving (https://foss.in/2006/cfp/speakers/talkdetailspub.php?talkid=97). This talk focussed on how to create user-groups and how to keep students in the linux user group, what can be done to build and sustain a user-group.

All the tutorial sessions were very useful.

In stall:

The Foss elective2 book attracted a lot of attention, from students and professionals and their queries focussed on when NRC-FOSS will start the certification program?

But only one drawback is that many talks were going on simultaneously. Hence, I was unable to attend some of them.:)

Subathra S

The foss.in 2006 was a wonderful event which I attended along with the NRCFOSS team. The event had good impact on the Indian foss community. The technical sessions were held in parallel with the exhibition at National Science Symposium Center, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

It was a great pleasure meeting the developers and contributors of various open source communities and gaining more knowledge in the foss arena. I convey my gratitude to NRCFOSS and the organizers of foss.in 2006 for hosting such a informative and memorable event.

Read more: MyExperience (In this webpage, I have briefed my participation in the technical sessions and exhibition)

Chinnaobulareddy U

foss.in 2006 was good event. It was good experience for me.

Day-1(24-11-2006):

In the Mornig Session,I attended Opening ceremony and Keynotes by Suparna Bhattacharya(IBM).Then I visited stalls like Sun Micro system,Direct X, IBM,Spike source.

In the Evening Session, I attended talk 'Open JDK-Open Source Java' by Anupam .R(Sun). I was so happy to hear that Java become opensource. Then i was in NRCFOSS-AUKBC stall till end of the day and attended some queries.

Day-2(25-11-2006):

In the Mornig Session,I attended a talk on 'KDE4 and You',it was very good talk and attracted more people.I also visited many stalls, Sun stall was announced that " Saturday is Sunday " and attracted more number of people than any other stall.Google,Wipro stalls were opened on second day to collect Resumes from the delegates.

In the Evening Session,I was in NRCFOSS-AUKBC stall till end of the day attended many enquires regarding Foss certificate and NRCFOSS activities.One person asked how to install HP printer On Fedora Core-4,gave mail-id to send reply with proper instructions.

Day-3(26-11-2006):

This day was very dull for me. We expected more number of people on sunday and only few people we were seen. From morning 11 AM , i was in stall and got inquiries from only few people.

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