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.