Foss.In @ Bangalore

Hello everybody,
Here I am back with my fresh holiday spirits, this time with a really cool experience. Yes, it all happened when we planned something useful for this vacation. It was Sagar who had told us about some conference that was to be held at Bangalore about various open source technologies, myself and ma friend kp registered at that particular website. We were happy that we got something to spend our holidays, and we were more happy, when we thought of Bangalore.

Things were going fine and we got all our tickets reserved and the final day come. We completed all our semester exams and started off the beautiful journey, expecting a dull conference and a cool bangalore. We were more concerned about visiting all the tourist spots and malls in and around bangalore. Finally we landed at bangalore. My friends stayed at a different place and I got my accommodation in a place far away from the venue. The venue was the Nimhans Convention Centre, Laccasundra and I stayed at Marathalli. So the first day I just got pissed off looking at bangalore's traffic and those boards of the buses, most of which were written in Kannada. I was totally blind. I dint know where to go, I dint know how to go and finally I saw a building which was similar to the one given in the foss.in website from the bus and just jumped out of it. Luckily it was the venue for the mighty foss.in

I was in a very formal wear, and I expected people to be seen around in Blazers. But to my shocking surprise, people were in T-Shirt and shorts. Oh man, I was just amazed and learnt the truth from the really geeky environment. It was really amazing to see all people whose laptops were filled with stickers of various open source projects. We gained interest and understood that something interesting was about to happen. It was a great start, with foss.in tradition: No chief guest, no inaugural ceremonies, It was really a cool way to start with people from different parts of the country lighting up the holy lamp.

The hall was provided with Wi-Fi and there were three majestic auditoriums and a huge workspace for the work outs. The sessions were really amazing, be it the e-pub or the session on making our identity open though identi.ca it was really amazing. It was really a variety show. The team really forgot about all the tour plans and we were just into the sessions by time. Be it a work out or the talk, the enthu level was very high and was pretty interesting.

It was a healthy competition between the KDE and the GNOME people. And suddenly i recognised some one, whom I had met already. It was Abhishek, our super senior at college currently working for Sun. We were really happy to meet him. I also met Mr.Sriram Narayanan along with Abhishek and it was a great experience talking with them about Belenix and Solaris. The features like zones, the time machine snapshots and the dtrace of the zfs file system snatched our hearts and immediately i had installed belenix in my system that very night. Hats off to the zfs file system. I had also signed an agreement with Intel, for being a part of the Moblin development team, helping them to make it available in regional languages and to do some translation stuff. Its a cool experience to support Intel.

And finally you all would ask me... What is the tangible benefit you got from foss.in??? Here is the answer for all you people, I was not a linux freak before I had attended foss.in. In fact I had used linux just to watch movies and had never worked before in linux or solaris and obviously it was windows for me in all ma technical role. But I learnt the beautiful source of development, which would be a great experience and realised that there are miles to go in the open source field before I sleep. In one word I would say,

Foss.in 2009 was a launchpad for me to Foss.in 2010

To sum up, it was the best of its kind at foss.in. We were so involved and occupied by foss in such a way that I dint even see Lal Bagh after a six day visit to bangalore ;-). It was a great learning experience and a chance to meet a global team, sorry the global family of open source. People who's presence was felt by me in the mailing lists had coffee with me, just un believable. It was just like a family get together, but a global family in this case irrespective of caste, colour and creed. Thanks to FOSS :)