lawgon

I waiting for the full posts with biography as promised in your post...

regards
Vivek

if you think that is a clique event, then you must simply ignore it! it is like you desperately wanted to a part of it and they refused to accept you!

this is not expected of you -- a gold medalist lawyer!

dont tell toolz that I am a gold medallist lawyer

maybe this url will clear things up:

http://www.perrier.eu.org/weblog/2008/10/04#foss-in

Success/Failure/Worth of an event like this is perhaps better judged by the people attending it and their experiences.

AFAIR plenty of people from the linux community (users, developers etc) in India attended the event and were mostly happy (some were not, because of somewhat lack of technical content in certain talks (breadth than depth)).

There is no other event in India which attracts linux enthusiasts (...) at this scale either in number of people or technical content.

If you look hard and if you are not shy, you can go and talk (about your ideas, their ideas, rant etc) to few prominent developers, lot more geeks and developers, LARGE number of linux users (at work or otherwise).

In short, go attend the event, talk to people and build/break things.

Life is too short to..

--

apart from the fact that I am not eligible to attend the event, there is a more important issue involved. It is this:

What is a foss contributor?

According to me, anyone who writes code, of any variety or quality, who documents, who adds content, who translates, who reports bugs, who fixes bugs, who goes around evangelising and spreading foss, who sits in IRC and on mailing lists to help people out - or maybe just to interract with people. Or just a person who uses foss. This is important. There are huge numbers of people in India who do this - and many of them do not even own a computer.

To create a caste system and proclaim and elite is a kick in the face of all the above people. Especially when the kick is administered by a non-contributer to the foss movement. Show me one other community event in the world where the team lead is a non-contributor. The guy hasnt contributed *one* line of code in the past 15 years while proclaiming himself the messiah of the Indian FOSS movement. A person, further, who is personally responsible for the fact that not *one* new face has emerged in the foss movement in Bangalore in the last 4 years.

FOSS is growing in India because of evangelism - creating a larger and large pool of talent - code will come as this pool grows. And I think you will find that a significant number of new coders - and a lot of supporters of fsck.in are from Tamilnadu, brought up and nurtured by the Chennai LUG - which conducts more foss related events in a month than the rest of the LUGs in India do in a year - and team fsck.in have done in their whole lives.

Not that any of us will stop our activities because some clueless non-coder is trying to define how to develop the FOSS movement in India, but it pisses me off to see the genuine contributors insulted in this manner. And when I am pissed off, I cant keep quiet - although I *do* try.

Then why you call Debian and Ubuntu packager as monkey?

oops - that was sarcasm. It was in response to this sentence:

"
Most new contributors focused only on low hanging fruit, such as translations, and distro-specific packaging. If people got involved with code, it was usually bug fixes and code maintenance.
"

this is what most debian and ubuntu contributors do, and people who do not respect this refer to them as 'packaging monkeys' which is a term I heard on IRC used by a centOS developer to refer to debian and ubuntu developers. As far as I am concerned, I dont care what a person contributes, what level of fruit he picks as long as

1. He contributes

2. He does not sneer at other people's contributions.