Entrepreneur Geek

I talked about building a FOSS Infrastructure for your organization at foss.in/2006. You can download the slides from the foss.in site as well.

I am waiting at the Trivandrum airport to board homebound Air Deccan flight. The flight has been rescheduled twice already, and I hope I reach home on time. It was a short trip to Trivandrum after having a great time at foss.in in Bangalore. Met a few people regarding a potential business venture. Good idea and good potential. Have to see if we can pull it off.

Took a few pictures around, and am posting them up in this free time Want to write up some notes from the meeting today and also experiences from foss.in!

A lot of photos from people will start flowing in now! I have posted the photos I took in the gallery. Not much of the pictures are from the event itself – more from around it. You can check out the flickr group for some more. There are even some videos on YouTube.

It’s been very enjoyable so far. After Suparna’s talk, I stayed on for “How we Fix the Software Industry with Open Source” by Christof Wittig of db4objects. He spoke about how commercial open source software can help the growth and sustainance. I was looking forward to hear more about db4objects, but despite being non-tech, his talk had a few good points. The most interesting part was the questions people asked – what if Oracle GPL’s, or how companies have to keep innovating to stay in the market. The Innovator’s Dilemma sounds logical, and something a business should be aware of.

I stepped out to visit Manish after lunch. It was a surprisingly pleasant experience with Adobe. More on that later.

When I came back, I was just in time for Andrew Cowie’s “On The Cutting Edge: solving the fundamental structural problem of the free software movement” His talk last year was the most popular, this one was good, but a few notches down. He talked about how the current version control is limiting collaboration between multiple projects and how it will not work in an occassionally connected environment. Same for bug tracking systems. He then described how he, along with a few fellow hackers, came up with a tool to beat the probems with makefiles and configure scripts.

The speakers’ dinner rocked with people joining and talking about a lot of things about FOSS and beyond. We also celebrated Karunakar’s birthday. Spent some time working on slides for my talk today in the night

This morning started with “KDE4 And You” by Aaron Seigo. He talked about what’s coming in KDE4. There are lot of things interesting – especially the abstracted libraries for VoIP, multimedia etc and the new design and icons.

As of now, Luke Kanies of Reductive Labs is taking questions after his presentation on Puppet – Portable System Automation. The tool looks good and is in use at Stanford and Deutsche Post. It’s done in Ruby and wraps platform specific package management tools like dpkg / rpm etc.

Getting ready for Rasmus’s Getting Rich with PHP5 now!

The community driven foss.in/2006 kicked off this morning. The J N Tata Auditorium is now packed with delegates, speakers and volunteers. Suparna Bhattacharya is talking about simple and minimalistic approach – especially deriving from her experience in working with the Linux Kernel.
Ok, so this is about the Linux Kernel, which I do not understand. The closes I got to operating system development was when we did NachOS implementation during the NCST course.

But, I am enjoying her talk. She spoke about crash dump, async IO etc. The initially complicated solutions – 5 to 6K LOC, and then much simpler approaches of 500 or so lines of code. Simplicity is good, and it takes a refined thought process to do it. The typical developer mentality is to add features, but how about keeping only what’s required. Awareness is growing about simplicity.

She says: “The art of simplification is an essential aspect of keeping the kernel useful and fun to work on”.

Another thing: “We generally think what will be required in the future, but the truth is, we don’t”!

That says a lot!