Foss for humans
Last weekend I attended fossconf.in - my first Floss conference, and it was a good experience. I met tuxmaniac and techno_freak of the #linux-india gang in BCB5 , and a lot more this time - Sup3rkidd0, lawgon, theju, goldgod, karunakar, kushaldas. I waited and ranted, as I couldn’t attend foss.in this time. Later I realized and was happy that I didn’t miss much by not attending foss.in, and was very much waiting for fossconf.
Fossconf wasn’t a conference fulla geek gods with laptops and hacking. But it was a conference for beginner. Though one would get bored seeing “Introduction to PHP/Python/Ruby” kind beginner level talks, there were advanced topics to choose from.
wifi wasn’t there - which was sad, but didn’t matter a lot. Engineering students - mostly from TN(1 from nitt), who came to MIT in their college buses (~80/college). It was a pleasant surprise, when I came to know that all the colleges in Anna University has Foss as an elective! (Will NIT-Trichy have a foss elective soon? )
While the conference was going on, market news kept disturbing me.
Lawgon talked on the Fossconf software itself, which I heard is going to be used in Pycon! His talk wasn’t anything about the code - it was about how the software evolved and how it solved the purpose, just in time. He showed the SVN system, and especially, how to make best use of IRC (#linux-india in particular). For me, IRC has been the best resource in the web, even better than any search engine.
MIT Chennai Campus looked really cozy and small, unlike my college. As you get down from the train in Chrompet railway station - you have the college!
The talks were in the Lecture halls, and in the Hangar(their auditorium+basketball-court+examhall+nothangar) there were Foss projects developed by students as their Final Year project, and the best project also got a prize from Brian Belhendorf(co-founder of Apache). Jaya Engineering College’s participation was really active in most of the places. Also there is a separate OSS conference to be organized by the MIT Computer Science association, named Carte blanche, and NIT Trichy is also going to have an install-fest (pengufest) along with Pragyan‘08.
I talked on OpenID, and my slides are in slideshare.net. I also managed to visit my 2 mama and 1 athai’s house in Chennai, but couldn’t make it to Rajagopal’s house this time.