FOSS.IN Day 3
FOSS.IN Day 3
2005-12-02T07:26:00
Got to attend some talks on Day 3. There was one on the Xen virtual machine monitor - it was fun watching all three of Debian, FreeBSD and NetBSD running on top of Xen!
Sarath, a 11th standard student from Kerala gave a talk on building Knoppix based LiveCD's - I think he was accompanied by an even younger (10th std) guy (Arjun?). It's good to see youngsters getting into GNU/Linux. Sarath is actively trying to propagate Free Software in his school; he told me that he is trying to make the school authorities let the students use gcc instead of Turbo C for their lab exercises. Praveen pointed out that the Allegro graphics library can be used for doing graphics manipulations in a way similar to what is done using TC.
There was a discussion in the Intel Hall on FOSS in education.It was interesting to see people discussing things without having any idea of grassroots level reality. There were a few gentlemen who wanted FOSS included in the Engineering syllabus and there was a `corporate' guy who wanted to know whether there exist any `intermediaries' through which he can get in touch with colleges. I don't know whether they have heard of a state called Kerala where a number of very hard working people are trying to get Free Software and GNU/Linux adopted in schools - there are no corporates here and there is no `Open Source'. It's an effort being undertaken by a group of forward thinking individuals who realize that Free Software is more about social responsibility than about `companies' and `profit'.
There was a talk on Advanced Python programming discussing stuff like generators, iterators etc.
Mahendra talked about InfyLUG - the Infosys corporate LUG. I always had this perception of Infosys being a company which does the worst kind of `copy-paste' `software engineering' in India - glad to see that there are people doing good work there.
Met Shreekumar, the graphics guy from HP. He is a very enthusiastic chap who has a child-like excitement about technology. I really like such people!
And last, the photos we (myself, KP, Maxin, Justin) got really excited about:
