LocalFOSS

80 years ago, on a fine summers night under a mango tree, a wizened old man was woken up and arrested in a village near Dandi, Gujarat. The reason: he had made salt from the rich shoresoils of the Indian Ocean. At the time, by law, no one could make salt without the favour of one Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, also known as Lord Irwin, Earl of Halifax, and other aliases including Imperial Viceroy. The old saltmaker was Mohandas Gandhi. You are probably wondering, "What could salt possibly have to do with software?" At this point in time: a lot. To explain, we must first touch on a WTO treaty. As a WTO member, India has found herself bound by the WTO "Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Agreement" (TRIPS) ruling. This broad ruling is being exploited by some to force developing nations to add stringent controls and to enforce many controversial requirements. [1] [2] This includes patent clauses that prevent and impede the manufacture of generic AIDS/cancer/malaria medications. This despite the fact that generics are recognized as an essential tool in preventing and controlling the effect of these crippling diseases and disastrous epidemics. [1, 2, 3]. Appalling. But let us not digress.

[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.

On November 24th almost 3000 people are expected for the opening of South Asia's largest Free and Open Source Software Conference.

What started out as a pavilion (kindly donated by a forward looking state government) in BangaloreIT.com, India's premier IT Event at the time, has grown quickly since 1999.

The 1999 "Linux Pavilion" (so named for the most well known at the time FOSS project) was a raging success, being dubbed the “the jewel in the crown of Bangalore IT.COM”. So successful was the pavilion that it was run again the next year, this time with the added feature of concurrent series of both technical and non technical talks, held at a nearby conference centre.

In 2001 it was decided that instead of running under the auspices of BangaloreIT.com the community decided that there was now a demand for a full conference focusing specifically on Linux and development of FOSS systems. So Linux Bangalore was born.

For three years Linux Bangalore grew, until in 2004, almost 3000 people turned up to hear from FOSS community luminaries from India and abroad. Speakers included HP's Bdale Garbee, Rasmus Lerdorf - PHP Founder and more. However they hit a problem. With the growth of the conference there were more and more calls to include other FOSS areas, such as the BSD's, Community Development and more.

In an announcement on the Belenix project page, Moinak Ghosh declared the release of version 0.4.4 of the Open Solaris derived operating system.

The significant feature of this release is the development of an I/O scheduler for the HSFS module in OpenSolaris. The I/O scheduler enhances CDROM read performance by using: I/O reordering using the CLOOK algorithm, I/O coalescing, semi-asynchronous readahead that benefits sequential read.This HSFS enhancement reduces LiveCD boot time by upto 24 seconds and improves general CDROM performance by upto 25%. Updated to a recent OpenSolaris source snapshot(20060626, 26 Jun 200) that contains many fixes and improvements to core OpenSolaris. Updated drivers and device support.