Linux ASIA 2006 The Delhi

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Linux ASIA 2006The Delhis hub for various
conferences, Indian Habitat Centre at Lodi Road
witnessed this years Linux Asia Meet which was
held between 8th to 10th February. IHC was the
perfect venue for this type of meet as you dont
have much gawkers here. As the venue, the
sponsors were also very catchyas expected. The
range of sponsors varied from Oracle, the
database giant to the famous online job portal,
naukri.com. Also making there presence felt were
big open source promoters such as Red Hat
Novell. Companies like HP and Dell, best known
for there offerings on IT infrastructure were
also on with there latest achievements and
peripherals. And ending the elite list of
sponsors were Intel, IBM and Googleno prize for
guessing who didnt participated in the
eventMicrosoft obviously.DAY 1 The
inauguration was done by widely known Dr. Deepak
Phatak, who is currently the Chair Professor at
KReSIT, IIT Bombay. He enlightened the audience
with his ideology on open source software.
Eklavya, a project started at IIT Bombay under
him was widely appreciated. Next in line where
keynotes from Oracle, HP and Red Hat showcasing
the usage of open source in there respective
firms.The first presentation of the day was of
Google. The Google team talked about there
support to the ecosystem of open source. A
considerable part of the talk was based on
various open source awards given away by Google
the best being Googles Summer of Code (In the
interest of students) this event from Google had
a placement upto the figure of 84.Presentation
from Mr. Bebo White, a professor from Stanford
University was based upon web applications
especially web 2.0 and got a great deal of
attention.Infosys prepared an exhaustive talk
on the active use of open source in Java, J2EE
and also informed about the latest trends and
tools used currently.The most awaited event of
the day was the session with cosmonaut turned IT
entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth. He and his
product, Ubuntu (ya!! an interesting namemeaning
peopliness) both won trophies at the Linux New
Media Awards during the November 2005 Linux World
Expo in Frankfurt. He addressed his thoughts
about open source and how is he implementing it.
The millionaire from South Africa also made
enthusiastic commitments of sponsoring projects
and hiring in India. Day 2Day two was all
together THE Fedora day (according to Red Hat,
Fedora is its lab version somewhat like a beta
version).
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The first stop on the second day was of
Novell/SUSE (surprisingly the second day being
the Fedora day). SUSE, a big boy among European
IT techies came up with a cool looky, NLD-10
desktop. Mentionable features of NLD-10 Open
office 2.0, Beagle search, Banshee, Fspot, Tomboy
and many more. The team also mentioned about
there ongoing efforts in improving KDE and GNOME
desktops. NLD-10 is also incorporated with MONO,
a feature rich development platform for an open
source .NET framework implementation.IMAGINE
the POSSIBILITIES! Next 10 years, you wont be
able to save data (including films, songs, etc.)
on our computer. Next 20 years from today, there
wont be any software (for computers) anymore. 30
years from today, there wont be more computers.
50 years down the line, most people wont know
how to operate computers. And finally 100 years
from now, human would be a highly endangered
specieAfter that, earths new tenants would be
aliensby the way the above mentioned lines are
the titles for some of the slides. Thats what
you expect in the best and the most entertaining
event of the day, which was a keynote session
with Mr. Klaus Knopper. Knopper, who is the
creator of Knoppix, provided the audience with a
highly hilarious philosophical talk and also made
a mockery of the present day license system,
thereby promoting the concept of free open source
software.THE Fedora Day was celebrated in bits
n pieces. Fedora came up with many informative
presentations on different topics like the use of
MONO, Fedora translators, process of
localization, etc. Fedora day ended with an
address from Christopher Bizzard. He pointed out
the difficulties in creating drivers for various
peripherals like printers, scanners, etc. He also
talked about 3D Graphics and various video cards
for making desktop a good experience. Lastly,
Fedora declared the release of fc5 (Fedora Core
5) in the next few months. DAY 3Day 3
being the last day also had some informal
activities amidst the technical talks and various
workshops. Many companies were offering various
promotional stuff and at one point of time all
tech buffs stalls and pavilions were looking like
mela stalls (especially the Red Hat stallthanks
to there dartboard game).Day 3 started with a
conference keynote delivered by David Axmark
(co-founder, MYSQL) followed by a presentation by
Mary Ann Fisher of IBM.Post lunch session was
resumed with a lecture, delivered by Mr. V Ponraj
(Director of Interface Technology for the
President). His exhaustive lecture touched
various aspects of the IT revolution in India. A
roadmap of the work to be done in the field of IT
till the year 2020 was also presented. In this
roadmap, projects like National Identity Card
(something on the bases of smart card) were
widely discussed. Topics on eGovernance
initiatives were also talked about. His presence
also gave the opportunity for the big companies
to discuss various hindrances which they face in
India.
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Next on the itinerary list was the discussion
with Brian Behlendorf (founder of Collabnet). The
Apache guru talked about his current plans on the
Apache Web Server. He also expressed his views
and thoughts on how a casual user can become an
expert and how can a path submitter turn to a
core developer in the open source field.Danese
Cooper of Intel and OSI presented the last
keynote of the 3 day expo. She promoted the
concept of FOSS (free open source software) by
giving examples from day-to-day life in a very
inimitable style. She also focused on the
participation of women in open source world.
So! What was the moral of the trip?Open
source ecosystem doesnt have CEOs and Managing
Directors it has only VOLUNTEERS (committed to
work 247). Nobody ( Everybody) OWNS the
community. with this motivating message, LINUX
ASIA 2006 ended. ANKIT GUPTAB.Tech (4th
sem, Compu-Sci Engg.)