Back home, and a few random thoughts

Published on: 2005-12-3

Home | Archive

Back home, and a few random thoughts

2005-12-03T10:09:00

Landed back home after 4 days of FOSS.IN - it's home sweet home again, no traffic blocks, no crowds - everything calm and serene.

I am glad that I took part in this event - the organizers had done a very good job and everything went off smoothly - the best part was the chance to interact with a whole lot of people with similar interests.

The only discouraging aspect of the event was that there was very little Indian innovation on display - both the commercial and the FOSS expo's were absolutely dry - maybe we do have places were interesting work is being done, they just had not showed up for the event - but I strongly suspect that we still remain mere consumers of technology.

FOSS.IN was a purely technical event, with absolutely no focus on social issues - for some reason or other which I find to be quite unfortunate, the event did not see any participation from those individuals and groups which are taking Free Software to the grassroots - these are the guys who are doing the really important work and not `techies' like us. Most of the techies were not even aware of the significance of the larger social issues involved.

I don't know what these guys find so fascinating about distros - the latest craze is Gentoo. We had a stall dedicated to that at FOSS.IN. Very amusing!

Sun had deployed lots of `Black Cats' at the expo hall (girls dressed in black). What purpose did this serve?

The mobile phone is a good thing, under certain circumstances. I would have found it difficult to manage without one the last four days.

People are always in a hurry in Bangalore.

People speak English with English accent in Bangalore.

Lots of people talk to themselves in Bangalore ;-)