foss.in 2008

I attended this Free and Open Source Software(FOSS) conference after a long time, it used to be Linux Bangalore earlier. The theme was pretty attractive, "Talk is cheap, Show me the code". Though I am not there yet as a contributor for any FOSS, this made me look at something seriously and get involved. But I am not sure if "talk" is really that cheap - the most effective communication is indeed face-to-face conversation(with a whiteboard/paper). But our industry doesn't really value people who can code well, people tend to forget that the cornerstone of this industry is finally code! May be I would say, "Let us talk with code".

But the conference was sparsely attended which shows the lack of interest in code(and may be FOSS) among the software community in Bangalore. The trend is to become hands-off to get more money, which is an unfortunate side effect of the low economy outsourcing business - businesses get money out of heads and to manage the huge number of heads, they create a hierarchy and the upper levels of the hierarchy is paid very well. And there are very few companies that has been successful by writing code and creating products.

Conference was a very frugal one otherwise, Rs.600/= for five days of the conference, food was "cheap" I guess, minimal veggie food(I carried some replenishments the second day - I am a grazer, need some food every 2 hours), no major advertisements or stalls. The talks were sparsely attended, but with wireless networking, you could feel at home. But I am not sure if having a laptop was a good thing because it is a distraction during serious talks because you tend to watch other things. The conference had a twitter feed, so you get updates on what was going on. But I guess to be really involved in the conference, one would need to be familiar with some FOSS code especially the kernel.

I got my laptop updated with a Mandriva linux distro during one of the talks by a friend, but we couldn't get the wireless up on it. Desktop linux still sucks - though the network was up after I plugged in the cable, I couldn't connect to any websites. Finally figured out that you need to disable ipv6 to get that going - I don't really understand it. Then the disks were making lot of noise which was not the case with Vista(which sucks in a different way). The sound wouldn't work either. Sure enough, the laptop vendors don't test with linux on it, but it is really frustrating to get things setup. Finally I moved to Fedora, which was far better - it detected wireless and the good thing was I could check this with a live CD. But the http connection problem with ipv6 was still there and there is no sound of anything except the keystrokes! Also the Fedora CD that was distributed at the conference didn't have any developer tools in it - but I had another DVD of Fedora-9 where I could get all the things needed. But I can tell you that it is worth the trouble, it is far more faster than the lousy Vista and as a bonus, I get a command line where I know what to look in case of trouble. I need to figure out how to get the sound fixed however to dump Vista completely.

So I am seriously looking at some of the FOSS code and see if I can contribute something before the next foss.in conference!