foss.in 2006 started off today. I reached the venue at 11a.m after roaming around and hopelessly struck and lost on Bangalore’s spiral roads. I got the registration done, my friends/team members were already there. My company’s management showed a nice gesture of agreeing to sponsor all our four members for the event. And this year, the audience turn-in rate seem to be very high and the facilities are much better than the last year. The lunch was surprisingly good too! The venue for the last year was bangalore palace grounds. Although, we didn’t get any T-shirt this time, there was a cute and nice Foss Mug. Directi gave away nice free T-shirt which said “I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code”, Needless to say, I grabbed one

There are stalls by Google, SpikeSource, Sun and Geodesic and CDAC. I also got Open Solaris Starter kit from Sun stall. But I was unable to install it on parallels on my MacBook pro. Or may be I need some time figure that out. Also, I checked out the simputer by PicoPeta (now part of GeoDesic). The interface was littly clunky, but its a nice device, they are even opensourcing the UI/OS. And the device is very light in terms of weight.

About the talks, I was not able to attend the first two talks, thanks to the confusing roads and the congested traffic in Bangalore.

How we fix the software industry with Open Source by Chirsto Wittig, db4Objects.

db4Objects has a dual-licensed embedded native java/.net database development company. Their model is similar to the MySQL business model. In simple terms, if you want to give the source of your product, you can use ours for free. If not, you pay.
This was a good presentation, and christof was comparing MySQL with Oracle most of the time. The main part was how oracle failed to understand the importance/threat of open source and how they realized and trying to align themselves by embracing the opensource. Personally, I don’t buy the idea of dual licensing. But it was an interesting talk. And stimulated many good questions from audience.

libyahoo2 The ‘other’ messaging library, Philip Tellis

This talk is mostly technical and is about the libyahoo2 c library which provides API for interacting with yahoo messenger servers. Nothing much to talk about, since I was not really interested in it. And the project is now in a “stable and stagnated state”

OpenJDK – Open Source Java, Anupam R, Sun Microsystems

In one word : “disappointing”. I was anticipating this talk to be a very nice and informative, but the speaker was so damn bored and bored us to death. I saw people in the first row almost yawning and trying their best not to sleep. Eventhough the slides of the presentation are made wonderfully, the speaker failed to give an impression that he knows atleast 10% of the what there’s in the presentation. I was very disappointed in this one for sure. May be sun might have sent a “real java” guy.

On the cutting edge: Solving the fundamental structural problem of free software movement, Andrew Cowie.

Another typical cowie’s talk. Lively, involving and technical. Andrew tried to give an overview of the three fundamental problems of Free Software: Version Control, Bug Tracking and Build issues. He classified the version control systems into three generations:

• Centralized (cvs, svn)
• Distributed(darcs, Bazaar-NG, arch)
• Power (git, mercurial, svk)

I don’t know how he missed Aegis version control system.

Then he talked about the bugtracking systems and their inter-operability and having a distributed bug-tracking system. It will be a really nice idea for Linux community since most of the Linux distributions are just packagers and not realy developers. If the bugs we file are “upstreamed” towards the original software project, then it would be of tremendous value.

Finally, it was about buildtool, which Andrew & co have developed. Its a replacement for the geeky-funny-and-sometimes-as-good-as-hell automake, autoconf, make and libtool build tools. I attended the full presentation during foss.in/2005. So, nothing new.

So that was the first day at foss.in/2006. More productive, interesting, enjoyable and fun than last year.

• Share