A Celebration of the True Spirit of Open Source
There is no denying the fact that knowledge sharing is the true essence of the open source movement. However, knowledge seekers in this domain certainly need a platform to connect with the gurus.
Open Source India—Asia's mega convention on open source—has evolved over the years as one of the most popular platforms for the lovers of Linux and open source. Considering that the acquisition of knowledge involves people and conversations, this too is a community event where, every year, national and international stalwarts from the world of Linux and open source gather, share knowledge, collaborate and help build 'open' communities.
Last year, at Chennai, the event was attended by over 3000 IT professionals including software developers, IT administrators, CIOs, and budding tech professionals. This year—the 8th edition of this event, to be held from the 20th to 22nd of November, 2011, at Bengaluru's NIMHANS Convention Centre—is expected to be even bigger.
Ahead of the event, we thought of giving you a peek behind the curtains, by introducing you to some of the luminaries from the open source world who will be speaking at the three-day convention.
We hope this helps our readers get to know more about: their favourite speakers and their tryst with open source, the subjects that they plan to speak on in the various tracks of the OSI convention, and the other sessions that they are looking forward to attending.
Here are a few excerpts* from the conversation that the LINUX For You team had with the open source gurus.
[*To read the complete interviews, visit www.osidays.com the official website of Open Source India 2011]
Know Your Speaker: Juozas Kaziukenas
“Open source is powering pretty much everything.”
Linux is the core of a majority of servers, especially Web servers. Most of the programming languages are open source too, so I'd say that only 10 per cent of all software written and used today is based on proprietary ideas.
In the future, the share of open source should increase even more, as certain technologies like programming languagesMore...
Know Your Speaker: Hugo Hamon
“At OSI, I want to discover how open source has evolved in India.”
I am a very big fan of the open source world, and that's why I have been an active contributor to the PHP community for many years. I started contributing to PHP by releasing my small applications and scripts. Consequently, I improved my programming skills, which enabled me to contribute to larger projects like Symfony. It's incredibleMore...
Know Your Speaker: Robert Lemke
“Open Source gives me high-quality solutions.”
For me, the primary benefit of open source software is the high-quality solutions I get. A broad range of product categories now come under open source. Governments, companies and private users have all understood the advantages of OSS. I like the fact that, in many cases, the free product is superior and the market leader, instead of its commercial counterparts.
Know Your Speaker: Kapil Gupta
“75 per cent of stock exchanges worldwide run on Linux.”
Open source technology makes business sense. Apart from being free and of very high quality, it is often more powerful than most commercially available products. That's because its shared development harnesses the brilliance of thousands around the world, who are continuously developing, improving and evolving its core. It's a worldwideMore...
Know Your Speaker: Mishi Choudhary
“Linux is a disruptive force.”
I owe my conversion to the cult of open source to Professor Eben Moglen, whom I met in Europe while studying in Amsterdam. His cogent and grandiloquent discussions in class got me interested in the collaborative economy. I spent six months debating with him about the pros and cons of community production, while converting from Windows to different distributions of LinuxMore...
Know Your Speaker: Venkat Mangudi
“Going from 'Ow' to 'Wow' in open source.”
Those of us who have assisted someone new to Linux/FOSS migrate to the open source world have heard endless complaints from them about how things are not working the way proprietary applications do. While we can attribute such complaints to ignorance or lack of knowledge, we need to understand that it is this impression at the consumers' levelMore...
Know Your Speaker: Vaitheeshwar Ramachandran
“Kernel programming comes with its own, unique debugging challenges.”
Kernel code cannot be easily executed under a debugger, nor can it be easily traced, because it is a set of functionalities not related to a specific process. Kernel-code errors can also be exceedingly hard to reproduce, and can bring down the entire system with them, thus destroying much of the evidence that could be used to trackMore...
Know Your Speaker: Dominik Jungowski
“Open source leverages the wisdom of the masses.”
Open source has the advantage that comes from leveraging the 'wisdom of the masses', yet it still sometimes lacks the professional element of proprietary products. I think good user interfaces (in general) are still the real issue in the open source world. If you compare the GIMP to Photoshop, you'll probably know what I mean.
WhatMore...
Know Your Speaker: Aseem Jakhar
“Open source allows us to research and innovate further.”
I am a *NIX boy, and have been working on the *NIX platform since I began my career. I just love the options provided by open source software, in general. There is so much you can do, tweak and learn. If you don't like something, you can just remove that part of the code, or change it to suit your needs.
You have an open sourceMore...
Know Your Speaker: Gil Yehuda
“Open source is about creating value from the contributions of many”
Many talks about open source focus on the benefits of using open source, and many of the “open source vendors” focus on the marketing advantages to working with them (though still paying them for various services). There is a third behavior that makes Open Source work—not just using, or selling, but contributing to. I’llMore...
Know Your Speaker: Bastian Feder
“It has become fun to install Linux.”
I cannot predict the future, but what we are seeing right now is that more and more companies are benefiting from open source software by building their products on libraries like Symfony 2 (SF2). They are also getting more into sponsoring these projects that they directly benefit from. An example here is SF2, which currently was taken to test for security vulnerabilities,More...
Know Your Speaker: Tobias Schlitt
“More and more technology will be freely available, courtesy FOSS”
It is interesting to see that what began with a handful of geeks, has grown to become a global movement in the last few years. Wikipedia and Open Streetmap are just two examples of the open source success saga!
I am neither a philosopher, nor an economist, but I think that the FOSS movement will accelerate further in the coming yearsMore...
