As a developer, I have to say that FOSS.IN/08 is possibly the most productive conference I’ve been to until now! In just 5 days, I’ve got more things done than I have in the last 5 months

Let’s start with the Beacon workout: Nandeep joined us via VoIP and we got started almost immediately, thanks to the dynamic nature and small size of our project – we didn’t have any infrastructural trouble as a few other C/C++ projects with huge codebases and complex build systems did. We had a list of 6 tasks in mind, and we managed to complete 3 of them. Salil Kothadia got started with writing a PDO data backend, and promptly submitted the patch to us next day. Thanks Salil, hope you continue to contribute to the development of Beacon (thereby increasing the development team size by 25%)!

I also attended Philip’s workout on porting HTML::Template to Javascript. As mentioned on the Wiki page, we mostly worked on the design during the first half or so, and then moved on to writing a skeleton for the whole framework. I think this is an extremely interesting project, and am very happy to be associated with its birth. Hope we can continue the momentum and work until it is finished.

Perhaps the biggest take-away from the conference for me was the ability to give a lightning talk about Glendix, with several kernel hackers present in the audience. Christoph then kindly offered to review some of the patches during the workout. Even the possibility of Plan 9 binary emulation being considered for inclusion into the main kernel tree is amazing, let alone the fact that I got the guidance of an experienced kernel hacker for a good 2 hours! I think the effort was largely successful – I now have a better idea of what I need to do in order to get a kernel patch in order, and also got a few hints as to how I can implement the missing bits.

My primary focus at the conference was to give a talk on Mozilla Labs and Innovation. I think I managed to stir up a decent amount of interest in the various Labs initiatives. I covered the different ways in which members of the community can contribute, specifically focussing on Weave, Ubiquity and the Concept Series. We even covered how easy it is to actually write an Ubiquity command. I now look forward to increased participation by the Indian Mozilla community in Labs projects. Don’t forget to thank Mary for all the goodies!

All this, apart from regular conference happenings like catching up with old friends, making new ones and free swag (great mugs and t-shirts this time around) makes FOSS.IN/08 one of the most successful conferences I’ve been to so far! I can’t wait for the 2009 edition

Glendix has been making the rounds on the web lately, with coverage from OSNews, Reddit, and even a Russian site, Linux.org.ru. It’s really motivating to see some buzz around the project, giving me the extra boost needed to push the completion of a usable release!

Some of the major obstacles that have to be crossed before making a beta-quality release are the completion of critical synthetic filesystems – especially /net and /draw. We also have to work out the kinks with per-process namespaces and union mounts. I don’t know if we’ll be able to get Rio running as a WM before an official release; if not, Plan9Port’s Rio and WMII are good candidates.

The biggest criticism of Glendix seems to be the reasoning that Plan9 user-space tools are somehow superior to their GNU counterparts, and several people have asked us to substantiate our claims. At this point, however, I don’t think that it is really important, or even relevant. Even if Plan9 user-space tools aren’t somehow better – I think it is generally a refreshing idea to see Linux combined with a user-space other than GNU.

We’re at FOSS.IN this year, where a large number of kernel developers have gathered; and I hope to get some of their valuable input on the problems Glendix currently faces, and maybe even write some code to solve them

Thanks for all the community support and critical comments, they are all very vital feedback for the project and are much appreciated!

Atul recently posted an update on why FOSS.IN/08 is going to be a lot different than previous incarnations. This has already caused a bit of a stir in the both the Indian and International FOSS communities, just going to chip in with a few thoughts.

The goal of the conference seems to be encouraging Indians to create innovative pieces of free and open source software, rather than just contributing tiny bits by doing jobs “no one else wants to do”; read packaging for distros and localization. First off, that is just downright insulting to everyone who has being helping out in those areas so far – undoing months of evangelism in just one sentence. I understand that FOSS.IN isn’t about evangelism and philosophy, but I think it is a bit much to actively undo work that others have been doing. FOSS.IN is India’s largest conference on free and open source software that fair amount of people look upto – a statement like that from the team runs the risk of pushing potential localizers away – harming the FOSS ecosystem rather than helping it. I am sure that’s not the intention of the team, but “low-hanging fruit” is a poor choice of words at best. It’s fine to change the focus of the conference, but it’s possible to have done that without labeling other aspects of FOSS that you don’t want your conference to be about.

The second thing that puzzles me is the choice of putting the “spotlight on Indian contributors”. Given the goal of encouraging more Indians to make significant contributions to FOSS, I don’t see how eliminating international speakers helps. FOSS.IN, being hosted in Bangalore, is going to attract only Indians as delegates, why does it matter if the speakers are Indian or not? I am sure delegates at the conference care more about what the speaker is talking about rather that his/her nationality. In fact, nationality isn’t even relevant to FOSS in any manner. If the number of talks by Indians was seriously low last year, I don’t forsee much change this year either – simply because there are more contributors who are not Indian – a “problem” that FOSS.IN wants to “fix”; but again, how does selecting fewer talks help achieve that? Also, if there are going to be fewer foriegners at the event, why bother organizing “light Indian entertainment”?

Lastly, I see FOSS.IN is drastically narrowing down on its target audience. In fact, I think there is nobody who falls under the category of the ideal participant in FOSS.IN/08. The conference is not for the “newbies”, it’s not for those who wish to help with localization, but rather for those who already possess the technical skills to contribute “significantly” to FOSS. Now, if they bothered to register for FOSS.IN as a delegate, they obviously know what open source is about and have initiative. Given all these conditions, I am sure they already have everything they need to start contributing, why do they need to attend the conference?

In the end, is FOSS.IN/08 just a giant hackathon? Where people just sit down and write code? You don’t need an elaborate 5 day “conference” hosted in Bangalore to do that.

</rant>

I do look forward to the results of this massive “experiment”

Day 3: The first day of the main conference. We thought we were running late (left home only at 09:50 after getting our Gentoo T-Shirts on) but the inauguration ceremony started half-hour late (as usual!) so we were able to catch the whole action. After FOSS.IN/2007 was kicked off by Atul & Kishore, Naba Kumar came up to give the keynote on Anjuta DevStudio. I didn’t know the origin of the name Anjuta earlier, but it was certainly fascinating

I had my talk on contributing to Gentoo right after the keynote, and we started at 11:30 on the dot (the schedules in other rooms were on-time). Gora gave an excellent introduction, and I began speaking to a somewhat-filled room about the different entry points to Gentoo development. The audience were really interactive and the questions were brilliant – this is something that I really liked about this years edition of FOSS.IN. There was a lot more interest in Gentoo than I had originally anticipated and it was nice to see our stall really crowded immediately after the talk. Hopefully, we’ve brain-washed atleast two-dozen people into using Gentoo :). The remainder of the day was spent talking to people who approached our stall – it got a bit monotonous though, answering the same question “Why is Gentoo different?” over and over again. We’ve decided to print out an FAQ poster and put it up to make things a little more easier for us

I had my third talk on Plan 9 from Bell Labs scheduled in the evening, right beside some really interesting stuff including the talk on PulseAudio and the lightning talk session. Again, I really didn’t expect much of a crowd for my talk, but I was happily mistaken. The room was not only full, but there were also people seated on the stairs and near the door! The talk went off really well, and I think it was *the* best talk I’ve delivered so far. The crowd was really smart and it was fun to interact with such an audience.We’ve planned to have a small Mozilla hack-a-thon today, let’s see how that goes. Besides that I’ve planned to attend a few other interesting talks. Looking forward to keeping the pace up, I’ll catch you all tomorrow!

We reached a little late for Day 2, because there were no talks in particular that we had wanted to attend. After reaching the venue at around 11:00, the first thing we did was to distribute the Gentoo t-shirts so folks could wear them today (the t-shirt needs one wash before wear). Shyam (fox2mike) had brought the Gentoo banner so we set that up in the stall. G0SUB and myself then attended pradeepto’s talk on setting up a KDE development environment. This was followed by an amazing demonstration of dtrace by the one and only GMan (Glynn Foster from Sun/GNOME). dtrace is really powerful, although I keep hearing about it, yesterday was the first time I actually understood how useful it is. After lunch, I attended Debarshi’s talk on Opyum, his summer of code project for this year. Also got to meet a bunch of other SoCers and we’ve all planned a SoC BoF along with a few mentors who are also present at the event.

Then we got busy distributing invites for the Mozilla party, and hung out with the Mozilla gang until it was time to leave. The party was at Opus which was a nice place with good (loud) music :). The karaoke was a big hit. After meeting a lot of people and having some good discussion, I decided to call it a day (I had two talks to prepare for!).Day 3 begins in a few hours – both my talks are today and we’re going to kick off the Gentoo stall, so I’m really excited. See you tomorrow with another update!

Quick update on the first day at FOSS.IN. We reached the venue at around 09:00 – the stalls were the first thing that caught my eye (especially the Sun & Google ones). After about 20 minutes of frantic organizers moving all over the venue at lightning speeds, all the speakers got registered and we moved to SDA/250 for the Mozilla PD.We started a little late – around 10:30 as opposed to 10:00. After brief introductions by Mary, Myk kicked off the project day with an excellent overview of the add-on scenario in Mozilla. This was followed by Prasad’s talk on building applications on the Mozilla platform. The calculator example – complete with it’s own add-on manager (for adding scientific support) – was a great way of giving the basics of Mozilla application development as was the highlight of the tutorial.

I gave the next talk on writing add-ons with JavaScript using XPConnect. Prasad and Myk had already covered a lot of ground on the basics of add-on and application development, so I was able to wrap up my talk in about half an hour – bringing us right back on schedule ;). The last talk of the first half was given by Mary which focussed on the various non-technical ways in which you could help Mozilla. The talk brought to light a lot of cool activities Mozilla was involved in. We broke for lunch at exactly 13:00, promising to meet back at 14:00 for the second half. Mary also kept a lot of Mozilla swag at the entrance of the hall – which included badges, mobile holders, tattoos, stickers and wrist bands. The crowd was ecstatic about them and needlessly to say that they were a great hit.

At lunch we caught up with a lot of other FOSS friends from #linux-india. Aanjhan transferred the Gentoo stickers which he kindly volunteered to print, and we hope to setup the Gentoo stall today so that we’re ready for tomorrow. I finally met G0SUB in real life, took me some time to recognize him because of the shaven beard though :). Post lunch we began with Krishnakant’s talk on accessibility in Mozilla, which as Gora said was an eye-opener is many ways for all of us. I was really impressed with the level of accessibility that the Gnome environment and Mozilla Firefox provided to the disabled. We discussed some ways in which accessibility could improve in Mozilla applications.The next talk was by Axel, which was about Localization in Mozilla. The coolest part of the talk was when Axel fixed a bug on localization (though it was ultimately closed as a WONTFIX!) because it gave a very good overview to the audience about the life-cycle of a bug. The final talk of the project day was by Chris Hoffman, which was about QA in Mozilla and how you can contribute to these areas which require some technical skills – “for people in the middle”.

We rounded off the project day with about an hour of one-on-one discussion with all the Mozilla folks, which was, in my opinion, the best part of the project day because we got to discuss a variety of topics (not only related to Mozilla or Technology even). We also decided to have a hack session for Mozilla, which would be tentatively on the 7th at the hack center.

After all the dust settled, we packed up around 18:30 and a group of around 12 went for dinner to “Sunny’s”, a nice Italian restaurant. Discussion on virtually everything ranging from food to movies and dtrace to macports ensued and we were done by around 21:00. After reaching home I just fell on my bed and now here I am, all geared up for FOSS.IN: Day 2!

Karunakar posted a few pics of Day 1 here, check them out.

FOSS.IN is here. Finally.I had been to the venue yesterday and I caught up with plenty of people, besides helping stuff the delegate kits with plenty of goodies (which I’m sure all the delegates will love). The venue looks great, the halls are awesome, and the excitement is high… I can’t wait to get started.

Later, I caught up with all the folks speaking at the Mozilla Project Day for Dinner at the Tandoor – I met Prasad, Krishnakant, Mary, Axel, Chris and Myk – all for the first time which was really nice.

Looking forward to a great day today, and I’ll keep posting events as they happen.