[GNU/LinuxInIndia] Ringo's post on FOSS.in to the Manipur LUG

-------- Forwarded Message --------
From: "Pebam, Ringo IN BLR SISL" <ringo.pebam@xxxxxxxxxxx> 
Date: 2006/01/02 Mon PM 04:17:33 GMT+05:30
To: <linux-manipur@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [linux-manipur] On FOSS.IN 2005

Late, but better late than never.... here's the report.

FOSS.IN started with a talk from Alan Cox, "Use the Source, Luke".   
It wasnât a hard core technical talk, but a general one. He boosted
up the spirit of those who those who were present in the hall.

He stressed on how to play our part. He told that there is lots of
work in the Community that has to be done. He suggested improving
the available code. He said that lots of kernel code needs
to be tested. Things that can be done are - test the code, find bugs
and report them to the community. There is lots of documentation
that has to be done. He said that can also be done by newbies.
He mentioned the kernel newbies and kernel janitor mailing list
where we can do something.

Dennese Cooper, talked about how to make money by writing Open Source
Software. She was showing lots of business models and stuffs.

There was Salamita Garcia, who talked about women in FOSS. It was
impressive to see a girl from Brazil, taking up the lead to
encourage more women to take part in free and open source world.
She gave some role model - there were many, and Tesla(wife of Alan
Cox) who is a Gnome hacker was also mentioned.

There was a discussion on how to implement FOSS in education. I
could see many points made my college lectures, students, and
University/Board people. I think the discussion will still go
on. There was a talk by Fred on the same topic too on the last
day. G Karunakar also gave a talk on Multilingual Internet.
I was engaged with Alan's and Haralds's talk and I miss both
Fred's and Karunakar's talk. Six talks were held simultaneously,
so I missed many of them. I also missed out the SELinux Internals
talk. Here I am mentioning those that are kernel related,there
were other very good talks happening in the other halls too.

Jon gave the kernel roadmap talk. He said, there are some
Developers who are good in developing but not so in managing
the development project; and Torvalds is one among them; he
said Andrew Morton is very good in managing things.

There was Ram Pai, who himself implemented the shared subtree
concept in the Linux Kernel. He worked on an algorithm developed
by Al Viro.

There were talks from some guy - on something similar to .NET
in Linux, there were talks of Music software for GNU/Linux based
systems, where you can make your own music.. make you play the
bass guitar, the rhythm, the drums and the lead solo...

Andrew Cowie's talk on Inside outside was very good, he
motivated those who are outside to come in, and make contribution.
It was a good talk, but I didnât like one instance when he made
fun of RMS; saying if it's to be called GNU/Linux, then people
will start suggesting names like Perl/Linux, this/Linux,
that/Linux. The matter is trivial, but GNU and FSF deserves
recognition. Jayakumar and I discussed on this topic. It's like
you give in all your life, your heart and soul to form an army,
you are fighting the battle, all of a sudden a soldier went
from the back, throws a bomb to the enemy, and every body is
crediting the soldier alone. I donât think that's fair.

There was Jayakumar, who talked on GPL, it was interesting to know
how many companies out there use Free Software and Violates the GPL..

Last Day, came Jon Corbet, the author of LDD, and he gave a hard
core talk on the inside stuffs, spin locks and concurrency â mutual
exclusion in Linux kernel.

Alan Cox talked about, device driver. He took up a simple PCI driver,
with basic functionalities and based on that he gave this talk. It
was inspiring to see the God - the man whose brain coded a major part of
what is Linux Kernel today.

Many questions were asked and he eagerly answered them all, and
he didnât rushed away from the stage, he stayed there for quite
long since questions never stopped...

Harald Welte's talks started 30 mins late, due to the many questions
that Alan had to answer. His was a perfect talk for someone(like
me :-), 
who has  profound joy in opening up things, seeing what's there,  
playing  with it.... which at times ends up spoiling it, and finally
gets scolding from parents :-) He talked about and gave a demo on how
he reverse engineered his Motorola EZX GSM Mobile Phone. He hacked
the Linux Kernel they used to run the mobile. He gave tips like
taking photograph at various stages when you open open up the
mobile so that you donât end up not knowing how to put back the
stuff to its proper form; he had to do permutation-computation to
find out the Jtag(BDI) pins, since it was done without any manual,
without any support from the vendor. He also cracked the encryption
Motorola made in the image to hide the GPL violation they made
in the code. Harald is also an active GPL police.

Both Alan and Jon are very down to earth people, though they are the
father figure, a demi-God stature in the Community. Jon eagerly replied
to some queries I made. Alan autographed on my T-shirt; comfortably
numbed, I told him, "You, are my God." smiling back, he said "I am just
a human, like you".

Linux Bangalore or FOSS.IN is not about just going there and
attending the talks.

It's about:

        * meeting like minded people
        * interacting with the guys who wrote those codes you use
          every day
        * realising where others are and where you are and what
          you can do
        * sharing knowledge, fostering ideas, making plans...
        * joy of being in a world, a world which you believe in,
          a world you eat and sleep with, day and night.

Nostalgic moments from Linux-Bangalore 2003:

    I met a youngster wearing a T-shirt that reads "GNU is not Unix".
    I asked him, where he bought it from, he said he screen printed it.
    And he came all the way from Maharashtra, and stayed in a cheap
    lodge, just for that 3 days event.

    Naba, was like a star out there, girls used to come to click
    photos with him. He distributed Anjuta CDs, he burnt from his own
    pocket. He was often cheered by Miguel De Icaza and Fred of
    Gnome/Mono, the guys who started Gnome. We talked a lot, we
    smoke a lot (Navy Cut) :-)

    This was where I attended a talk by Karthick, where he mentioned
    he and his friends are writing an OS. I noted his mail id.
    When I got stuck, I mailed him, called him - and he was always
    there. Now he is a close friend of mine, not only technically
    but personally too.
               
    I was struggling with Maurice Bach, those days, I hadnât taken
    up Rubini that time. I had lots of questions, and many couldnât
    answer me. So, I shot many of them to Harald Welte, he answered me
    all of them. Wondering how he might have learnt them, because he
    must have surely gone through the same phase I did, I asked him;
    whether he learnt the kernel and stuffs when he was in
    university; he replied smiling - "I never went to college."

Wish you all a very Happy New Year.
 
- Ringo  

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