Who doesn't like pleasant surprises? I got one this September when Vinay S Rao, one of my juniors at my college told me that they will be celebrating Software Freedom Day 2011. I was happy, for the fact that the sprit of Freedom and Openness was still alive in my college, and there are people to carry it forward.
I still remember the day when I entered into the hall where hackfest was going to happen in at Genesis 2007. Just like everybody else I though they'll teach how to intrude into others' systems and do other crazy stuff. Little did I realize that it was a day when I was going to change; my way of computing was going to change.
(Here, the word hack will be used as per defined here)
After a long time of excitement and joy, atlast FOSS.IN 2009 started today. Reached the venue at 10:30 AM instead of the 10 AM I had targeted. At the venue, NIMHANS convention centre there was a long line for delegate registration (surprise, I'm a speaker this time, no queues Smile ) and the weather was really hot and uncomfortable.
Full sized images can be accessed
here
So, four of us - Jatin, Megha, Me and Siddharth were selected as Sun OSUM leaders for the college, and Software Freedom Day 2009 was the first experience for our team.
I never thought I'd be having so much fun with KDE and FOSS Software as a whole. Its such a good way to learn things and contribute to something which is really beautiful.
In January, I was studying Qt because I found it very interesting, and its cross platform nature really made me to plan serious development.
Then I started to use KDE, which has a very intuitive interface for users. But here comes the real benefit - KDE is a Free Software, so anyone can contribute to the system and improve on it.
t was 28th Of September, 2008 and there was again crowd at the Microsoft India Office, Bangalore. This time I was able to attend a hands-on session about "Singularity", an open-source Operating System, being developed by Microsoft Research (relevant links at end of the post). I attended the 2nd batch of around 35 people in a lab in the building. I was excited because of the two words Open Source and Microsoft were coming at once.
