ervin’s piece of web

Last day of FOSS.in I had some network problems, and I’ve been
left with almost no access since then. Hence why I’m blogging this
only now and the entry will be slightly short.

The last two days were marked by a few talks I attended.
Particularly, Danese Cooper talk was brilliant, she’s one of the best
speakers I know. This talk was very interesting, and relevant to most
people employed to work on Free Software. How to keep your ethics. How
to make your employer move forward in the right direction. Are important
part of the equation now that we see more and more companies involved
in Free Software development.

Of course other outstanding talks were the ones by Till and Volker
about Akonadi. Very well done guys! It gave me a very good overview of
what Akonadi is, and how to develop with it. I already claimed in the past
that I would never ever work on the kdepim codebase… Honestly they
gave me the will to work on Akonadi based PIM stuff which is a small
miracle. Akonadi really looks like the way to go for PIM: shareable accross
desktops, lightweight yet powerful, a nice and clean API taking care of years
of experience from our PIMsters. Congrats to everybody involved.

Last but not least, the talk from Andrew Cowie about how to become
a contributor was quite nice too. The idea to do it along with Shreyas was
terrific, it gave a very entertaining talk. Too bad there was too much content
for the allocated slot and they had technical issue at the beginning of the talk.
They had to rush in the end, which is unfortunate for such an important topic.

Finally, we had the official closing of the conference, it started with a
talk by Rusty Russell. Basically he was asked to give a talk which would give
everybody the will to become a contributor. Then, he came up with the very nice
idea to explain is own story, and to invite other kernel hackers to do the same.
After that he invited Sheela on stage and she made her first patch to the kernel
in live. That patch was sent on the relevant lists, we learnt later that it
got applied and will be shipped in the next kernel… Yes, that was that easy!
In the end of his talk he invited almost all the attendance on the stage: contributors,
users, people knowing developers, etc.

Atul then got on stage to the closing talk, he invited a few people to talk about
other indian conferences and events around Free Software. There’s so much potential
here that it’s really nice to see some dynamics around this topic in India.