FOSS.IN/2007 – The most exquisite FOSS event

In an earlier post I mentioned how much Mozillians have influenced me and that will surely give an idea as to how much eager I would be to meet any of those people. Well it finally happened this year during the FOSS.IN/2007 as IISc in Bangalore. I was looking forward for this event even before Mozilla was a part of this. I had missed it in the last couple of years and this year I was very keen on attending it as I was in Bangalore itself and the venue was so close to my residence. I sometimes even thought of bunking office for all the five days and have some real good time with all the open source freaks from different parts of the world. As crazy the idea seems to be I was able to attend the event only for one full day and a part of another. That apart, my interest in the event doubled or increased by several times when I found out that Mozilla was one of the projects for Project Days and few of the folks that I had talked to over IRC were coming down to speak at this event. I was very much excited and followed the event very closely. I completed my online registration the day it was announced, I subscribed to the RSS feed of the FOSS.IN/2007 main page, looked at the schedule when it was posted, read about speakers and what they will be speaking when that was put up. Basically I made sure I did not miss out on any detail. Another thing that caught my attention was the Google summer of code BoF (Birds of Feather) that was proposed and also accepted. This was another chance to meet fellow countrymen involved in the development of FOSS. Altogether this was something really big and was close to one of my all time dream of being amidst full time geeks and computer science pundits.

I was getting ready for the event and unfortunately cold and soar throat struck me a couple of days before the event. Nevertheless I asked for a sick leave on the first day of the event and thanks to my manager who granted it immediately. I quickly got ready by noon after some extra resting in the morning and took my uncle’s laptop and moved to IISc to meet the OSS freaks from different parts of the country and the world.

As I was late I missed out on talks related to extension development and a couple of other dev stuff in the Mozilla project days schedule. When I went there it was close to lunch time and almost everyone was moving to the dining area. As I was not completely healthy I had restrain myself from enjoying the FOSS delicacies. I just roamed around the event area looking at the various corporate stalls that were put up there. A couple of days before the event I had met a friend’s brother, who was going to launch a product of his company in this event. I went and met him and looked at the various products that were out there for exhibit. This got over pretty quickly and I had to find something for me to spend time.

Fortunately the event area was Wi-Fi enabled. I utilized the lunch break to update my Mozilla repository on my uncle’s laptop and also to submit a patch which was waiting in my inbox. The wireless connectivity was really good and the speed was well worth mentioning. By the time my repo was up-to-date the afternoon session had started. Then I moved to Satish Dhawan auditorium where the Mozilla talks were being held and spent the rest of the day with the Mozillians. More about the time spent with Mozilla folks in a later post. But I must really thank Team FOSS.IN which made it possible for me to meet the Mozilla people and have some good time with them.

On the whole the FOSS.IN/2007 experience was awesome and memorable. It was very well organized and at the end of the day I saw Atul Chitnis (One of the main men behind the success of the event) hanging around with the volunteers. The sleeveless jackets that the volunteers were given always made me feel that I too should have been a volunteer. ;-)

Jai Shree Yalaguresh Prasanna

Hari Om.