As reported, FOSS.in took place this year, in Bangalore, India. I was fortunate enough to be invited again to this leading Free Software event in India, if not Asia.
The event hosted many very good people and it was a real pleasure to be surrounded by smart folks that love Free Software. It’s a real honour to be invited and speak on the same stage as these people. And it’s an honour to be able to talk about Free Software in a so called developing country and try to form the next generation of Free Software hackers.
There were many talks and I think I will follow up with a separate post about that.
My first talk went really well I think (others do seem to think so, too). The audience seemed to be genuinely interested and I enjoyed being on stage. At some stage, I need to revamp my slides though. I usually go with TeXed slides, but for the GNOME ones, I keep using LibreOffice. One of the minor problems is, that I want to play videos from within the presentation. I can do that (more or less) with LibreOffice and PDF can also do it. But this is not working with my version of Evince :-\
Anyway, thanks to hasgeek.tv, we have recordings of FOSS.in (Day1, Day2, Day3)! And here is my first talk live on tape:
The second talk was a surprise for me, because I was told just a few hours in advance that I need to give another one. Apparently someone couldn’t come and the slot needed to be filled. I jumped in and did my show. I was still a bit hung over from the night before, but it went off well. Except for the fact that my laptop went off the presenter desk. It’s a bit shaky still, so if you happen to have a spare machine that’s decent enough, let me know. Anyway, I have to say, that I dislike the fact that I was told just a few hours in advance that I had to give another talk. But I appreciated being the one that is considered to entertain the people the most. Also very interesting was that I sat on a panel that Lenny moderated. I remember well when Lenny was asked to do that for the first time last year in Japan. He does it well and again, I felt very honoured to be invited to sit next to all those important people, eventually being considered being one of them. However, it appears that there no videos yet.
As for the rest of the trip, we went to Sri Lanka and did a round trip there. An interesting country indeed. Very developed. Not as affordable as expected but still very good value for us whities.
I hope that the FOSS.in team manages to pull it off again next year. I really believe that the event impacts the development of Free Software in the region. And without such an event, great opportunities are lost.
As usual, thanks to FOSS.in and the GNOME Foundation for supporting me to go there.
