A few thoughts about the “Omelette post”
Check out Atul’s Omelette post announcing the complete transformation of FOSS.IN to a pure “code contributor” only conference - if things go according to plan, we should have a really exciting conference - I don’t want to miss it this time!
FOSS.IN has never been about advocacy, or philosophical discussions. While such discussions may have their place, they steal valuable bandwidth when it comes to getting things done. Especially here in India, where we tend to lean towards political and religious aspects more easily than we tend to roll up our sleeves and get some work done, it is important to understand that FOSS.IN is meant to achieve tangible results.
Philosophy, advocacy and activism DO have their very important place; it’s sad to see people not realizing this. They do not get in the way of “getting things done” but are crucial to getting things done. I am sure Atul understands this, and just wants to say that FOSS.IN is intensely focussed on getting people who contribute code to FOSS projects together and having them hack on interesting stuff …..
Effective this year, FOSS.IN will focus on developers, and results. It will highlight credible efforts by people in India contributing to FOSS, and will bring together developers at peer level, to allow them to interact, discuss, develop and deliver.
Correction - “it will highlight credible efforts by people in India contributing CODE to FOSS”.
Now I understand that many people will feel left out. There will be howls from the detractors about us abandoning the basis for Free and Open Source Software, and us being “Anti-FOSS”.
Not at all - where is the problem if it is made clear that FOSS.IN is very specifically a get-together of “code contributors”?
On the other hand, there is a problem if FOSS.IN is positioned as a platform for FOSS “contributors” - then it has to include the passionate school teacher in a remote govt school in Kerala who struggles to get Debian installed on the school PC’s, the farmer who uses GNU/Linux on his machine (while the software “engineer” still whines about how “difficult” it is), the activists who campaign for Software Freedom …. all these people contribute in important ways to the growth of Free and Open Source Software.
