FOSS.IN/2007 experience

FOSS.IN is one of the premier FOSS events that happens in Bangalore, India every year around November/December. I remember the days when I attended the first ever Linux Bangalore event LB/2001 (FOSS.IN then called Linux Bangalore). The event has grown by leaps and bounds; not only focusing specifically on Linux, but also on all other FOSS technologies. The venue this year was IISc, Bangalore during Dec 4 - Dec 8.

Along with the usual Main Conference, BOFs, Expos, two new additions to FOSS.IN/2007 are:

1. Project Days and
2. HackCenter
   

"Project Days" are inspired by mini-conferences - full day sessions on a single FOSS project, led by the lead developers/contributors (e.g. KDE, GNOME, OpenOffice etc).

"HackCenter" is basically a large area provided with power, switches n/w, Internet, tables and chairs where people can get together and work on a FOSS project as a group.

Sponsors of the event include Sun, Google, Red Hat, IBM, HP, Citrix, Zimbra, ABB, Akamai, Trolltech, SpikeSource, Geodesic Information systems Media Partners (Dataquest and PCQuest) and others. My employer's event absence was heavily questioned and I was tired diplomatically answering those question.

The main conference started on 6th Dec with the inaugural talk by Atul Chitnis, the man behind the event, that was followed by Naba kumar's keynote on Anjuta DevStudio.

James Morris gave a talk which is aimed to demystify the Kernel development process and encourage contributors. Last year, we had Christoph Hellwig talking on Kernel development mostly covering the same aspects. Though the information was nothing new and was talked about by Greg KH in his "Kernel development HOWTO" or Randy Dunlap's "Kernel development: Getting started", his talk was filled with interesting self experiences.

The talk I most liked was by Rusty Russell on lguest, the hypervisor written using paravirt_ops. I tried to setup lguest on my Thinkpad during the event in the "HackCenter", I got stuck because of some scsi issues with 2.6.24-rc4 vanilla kernel. The next interesting talk was on Union Mount, VFS based Filesystem Namespace Unification by Bharata B Rao. After the talk we had an unplanned BOF on Union Mount since there was a lot interest.

Kamalesh Babulal gave a talk on Linux kernel testing, a nice talk covering almost all aspects of Linux kernel testing. He correctly pointed out the need for developer's contribution to test cases and the low test case coverages given the number of lines being added per release.

The project days this year covered mostly with the basic stuff. There were a few interesting talks. One among them was on "ZeroConf networking with Avahi" by Lennart Poettering.

Most of the sponsors had a stall including Sun, Google, Red Hat, Citrix, Zimbra, IBM, Akamai, Spikesource, ABB and others. Almost every stall happened to be a recruitment booth. Sun had few interesting demos on Open cluster, Grid computing, Glass fish, OpenDS and so on. IBM had a demo of System tap.

There is a global perspective that Indian software industry is a big consumer of FOSS projects and contributes very less, given its size and international presence. This is a sad truth. I should say FOSS.IN is a concious effort to change that perspective. It may a take a year or two or may be few years, but lam confident that the number of Indian FOSS contributors will surely grow.