LocalFOSS

[Ed]Below you'll find a personal report from Jaya Kumar, one of the speakers and attendees at this years FOSS.IN[/ED]

I attended FOSS.IN/2006 this year. It was successfully completed about 2 weeks ago (Nov 24th-26th). It was held at the JN Tata Auditoriums at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. The venue was attractively green and quiet, in a well kept university campus.

Attendee numbers have not yet been published but it is expected to have been around 2000 attendees for each of its 3 days. The speaker list incorporated famous as well as up-and-coming FOSS developers and advocates from all over the world including places like Germany, Canada, USA, Scotland, Brazil, Australia, Sweden and of course India.

The Linux kernel community was well represented by Suparna Bhattacharya (fsdevel), Harald Welte (netdev,GPL-violations.org), Christoph Hellwig (netdev, fsdevel, etc), Jamal Hadi Salim (netdev), Liam Girdwood (ALSA ASoC/DAPM), Ashwin Chaugule (mm), kernel developers from local companies such as Wipro and Infosys, and others.

Equal excitement was associated with talks by Aaron Seigo (KDE), Sirtaj Singh Kang (KDE), Rasmus Lerdof (PHP), Christof Wittig (db4objects), Russell Nelson (Open Source Initiative), Milosch Meriac (OpenPCD), Luke Kanies (puppet), Sulamita Garcia (EDS), Peter Karlsson (Solaris), Roger Persson (robotics), Sunil Abraham (APDIP/IOSN), Fredrick Noronha (bytes4all), Sudhakar Thaths Chandra (Google), Bernhard Krieger (Cambridge University), Kartik Mistry (Debian), Tim Pritlove (CCC), OpenSolaris developers, Prashanth Udupa (VTK Designer) among many others.

As can be seen from the speaker list, the sessions covered a diverse range of topics and issues of interest to the FOSS community. There were also many birds-of-a-feather (BOF) sessions held on an ad-hoc organization basis to address subtopics of interest to attendees. There were also many vigorous impromptu hallway discussions.

The event was very well organized. The project lead, Atul Chitnis' started the event with a disclaimer about delays, but it turned out to be unnecessary. Things happened on time and even BOF sessions were in the stated locations at the right time. Travel, accommodation and even entertainment for non-local speakers was superbly arranged by the core event managers with the help of a dedicated team of volunteers from the local FOSS community.

Media coverage for the event was high in the local press. The event got mainline coverage from The Hindu [1 , 2 , 3 ] which is among the leading newspapers in India. Several articles were seen in the press service highlighting the growing interest and value of FOSS in this region as well as respected local contributors such as Suparna Bhattacharya [1, 2]. Tim Pritlove of the Chaos Computer Club and Blinkenlights fame also received press coverage. [1]

Readers interested in the details of the event are encouraged to peruse the FOSS.IN/2006 Schedule webpage which links to slides and content from each session. Further postings from a range of participants is also available on planet.foss.in There are also a large number of photos [ Flickr fossin2006 ] and videos [ Youtube foss.in , Google Video FOSS.IN/2006 ] taken by attendees. Higher quality media content captured by the organizers is currently in processing and may be available soon.

Last year, a FOSS.IN keynote speaker, Jonathan Corbet (Linux kernel, LWN.net) had written a very insightful review of the conference and the FOSS community in India. To paraphrase his article, he pointed out the following issues:
1 - India ought to be able to contribute more to the FOSS community given its large developer base
2 - Misunderstandings associated with FOSS licensing need to be addressed so that more Indian developers and their employers can become directly involved in the FOSS community
3 - Indian developers need to be more engaged with the wider FOSS community, be more passionate about their software and more proactive in addressing FOSS issues.
4 - The Indian education system must be improved to emphasize creativity and curiosity which are the basic expectations of any effective member of the FOSS community
5 - More local Indian role models are needed.
6 - More commercial organizations in India and worldwide need to get involved in supporting this thriving development community that they benefit from.

It is interesting to gauge how much has changed in 365 days. Addressing issue 1. There are measurably more Indian developers involved with FOSS today than there were 365 days ago. Greping for in.ibm.com, Infosys and Wipro on the Linux kernel mailing list log shows significant improvement in raw counts over last year. One could extrapolate this to other projects as well. But there is still a long way to go and significant improvements needed in the depth and quality of involvement before the local community can start to be satisfied.

Addressing issue 2. This is a deep problem that involves not just the community but judicial systems and also lobbying from multinational corporations. Several talks were held covering this topic and it is clear that there has been an increase in the quality of discussion about these licensing issues as well as the problems associated with software patents and digital rights management. Hopefully, more employers are becoming aware of the benefits of FOSS from the increased visibility in a wide range of areas such as products (Linux phones, embedded devices) and services/applications (Google, firefox, OpenOffice, Apache webservers, etc).

Addressing issue 3. As broadband penetration increases throughout India and computing costs decrease, more local developers are starting to participate and get involved on their own initiative. The encouragement from the wider FOSS community and improved understanding of cultural idiosyncrasies thanks to the Internet are helping Indian developers improve their ability to contribute back to the community. One can be hopeful that the friction that tends to occur when developers from very different backgrounds try to work together is being reduced as cultures become more globalized. Conferences such as FOSS.IN greatly contribute towards this goal.

Addressing issue 4. One of the sessions that was held was a panel discussion titled "10 years of Linux in India". During the QnA portion of this session [video excerpt] and a followup BOF [video excerpt], it was clear that a large number of students as well as a few educators wanted to address the failings of the education system. There was vigorous discussion about the problem. Acknowledging the problem is a first step to fixing things. Several educators confessed that changing the Indian education system was a very difficult problem. Fortunately, as evidenced by the BOF, it is clear that there are many dedicated individuals who are aggressively trying to fix things.

Addressing issue 5. Atul Chitnis said it best with the following quote. "She is everything FOSS.IN stands for, and we are proud to have her giving the opening keynote address of FOSS.IN/2006. No one on earth is better qualified." Atul was referring to the opening keynote speaker, kernel developer, Suparna Bhattacharya. Role models like Suparna are the key to realizing the potential within this community. It is great to see this happening and one hopes it will increase next year.

Addressing issue 6. It was heartening to see this years sponsors list. The sponsors were in order of merit as follows, The Indian Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, Sun, Geodesic, Google, Directi, db4objects, ABB, Wipro, SpikeSource, CDAC, and NRCFOSS. All of us who attended also gave a standing ovation to the diamond sponsor who is a real role model for all of us. With his contribution, he has reminded us of what this conference means. He is a core contributor to the Linux kernel, netfilter project and is most recently involved with the OpenMoko project. We all give thanks to HW.
That said, there were companies that have development offices in Bangalore and that clearly benefit from FOSS but were missing from the sponsor list. Not much further can be said about that.

The event opened and closed with lights. Specifically, it had opened with a beautiful lamp lighting ceremony involving representatives of each of the major FOSS user groups from across India [ video excerpt ]. It then closed with the amazing Blinkenlights closing keynote by Tim Pritlove who ended with an excellent request to all attendees which I shall reuse here. "Go out there and do some good things!"

Feel free to redistribute this article as desired.