Through the Looking Glass Adventures in Solaris Userland

FOSS.IN - Day 3

The final day of FOSS.IN was quite memorable. The demos and BOFs were scheduled as usual along with one talk by an OpenSolaris community member.

The crowd began coming in late on a lazy Sunday morning. By Mid Afternoon the ZFS demo should have been sold to a hundred people ! Seeing the interest in ZFS we decided to have a BOF. About 10 people turned up for the BOF and It proved to be very  interesting. Sanjeev and Nagki, our local ZFS gurus went deep into the depths of ZFS explaining design principles and the complex algorithms of ZFS. The crowd proved equal to the task and fired back questions left and right. By the time the BOF was over, a few people were in a total state of shock. They could not quite believe that all this is Open Source !! "So, when it is going to come to my Mac ?" was the question that we got at the end of it !

After that I attended a BOF on promoting FOSS in the Student community in India. Both students and prominent members of the FOSS community attended it. While the students complained of the lack of support, resources and interest in FOSS. The FOSS members shot down most arguments with "You know what I did when I was in College ?". It took a few sensible folks from the Linux and OpenSolaris community to turn the discussion to a more meaningful one. In this process I also came to understand that HP and IBM are as much active in educational institutions as Sun is and debatably more so. Most of the Students were very bullish on HP and IBM because, even if they don't contribute as much code as Sun to the FOSS community, they offered a *lot* of Jobs to students involved with FOSS.

The best and most surprising part of the day was when Anil Gulecha, a community member who had modified BeleniX to boot from a USB Pen Drive gave a talk on how he did it. It had an overflowing full house and was a resounding success ! 

Later in the evening we wound up early and said farewell to FOSS.IN/2006. It was a very instructive experience overall - Getting to know the local FOSS community better, viewing the world through the eyes of customers and developers, evangelizing vastly superior technologies like DTrace and ZFS and connecting to other people in general.

I can bet we would be there @ FOSS.IN/2007 with an even more stronger presence thanks to all the lessons we learnt this year !

Posted at 08:10PM Nov 27, 2006 by Ananth Shrinivas in Sun  |  Comments[4]