A Dog worth 16,000 dollars an hour

Some time back, i was involved in an animal welfare society. A couple of americans dropped in, dug up the mangiest, most fleabitten and sorriest looking mutt they could find and took a photo of it. Posted it on the internet. 'Save Indian Animals'. In the first hour they had collected $16,000 in donations. What happened to the money is another story. There is a strange relationship between bleeding heart westerners and some breeds of Indians. The westerners, burdened with guilt, tend to take any report from India at face value, and the Indians tend to only respect what is endorsed by the westerners.

So to the ongoing debate on whether FOSS.IN has any thing to do with the open source movement in India and whether the community should support it. The major argument in favour of FOSS.IN is that it is a $16,000 an hour dog - namely endorsed by a lot of westerners. Incidently, the westerners involved all have impeccable credentials, but that is not the point. The point is - dont we also have indigenously produced contributors and movers and shakers in the open source field? And doesnt their endorsement count for anything?

Raj Mathur on the ILUGD mailing list has raised two questions regarding FOSS.IN. Firstly the conference will be show casing proprietory software also. And secondly that the entity called 'linux bangalore' which is running the conference is a apparently not a community driven one. In short, he asks, how can a conference run by a 'closed source' organisation in a 'closed source' non transparent manner, showcasing closed source software in the exhibition arena contribute in any way to the development of the open source movement in India?

Here it is also relevant to note that the conferences termed lb-2001, lb-2002 and lb-2003 were conducted by the Bangalore Linux Users Group - and these were trail breaking conferences. In the beginning of 2004, the Bangalore Linux Users Group was dissolved and the entity known as Linux Bangalore claims to be its successor. The full story is here: http://kingsly.net/kingsly/Linux/bangalore/no-blug/

There is another school of thought which says - look, dont spoil India's image abroad by indulging in politics. Politics, as far as I know, is manoeuvering for position and power. Not for pointing out defects and discrepancies. We also have healthy well fed and trained dogs in India and are quite capable of breeding more.

Incidently, my own final spat with Atul Chitnis was over the conference management software. This software had been developed by various members of the Bangalore Linux Users Group over the years and and as far back as 2001 a project in sourceforge http://sourceforge.net/projects/eveman had been set up to open source the software. This never happened. This year, a couple of us volunteered to help out in open sourcing it - we were met with a flat refusal. The software developed by BLUG members is now the property of Linux Bangalore.

The debate on the ILUGD list is going on