Friday Mar 13, 2009
..well almost 
The next Christmas is still sometime away and the last one passed few months back.
Nevertheless, its celebration time in Sun Microsystems, India Engineering Center (IEC). We are celebrating Open Source during the 24th and 25th of March, 2009 in our IEC Open Source Mela:
The momentum is gradually building, and we are all getting set for the event. The entries are coming in gradually and the posters have been put up all around in the offices.
All getting set!
If you work in IEC, you are in for some fun. If you do not, you are missing something.
Doesn't the poster look delicious? Thanks to Anjana for some great work with the posters.
Wednesday Mar 26, 2008
Two great talks wrapped up the mela today:
- "Digital Colonization and Open Source Technologies" by Dr. Jaijit Bhattacharya
- "Why free and open source software?" by Prof. Andrew Lynn
Both the talks offered a whole new perspective to think about free and open source software. The talks focused on using open source software to reach out to more people. Dr. Jaijit's talk covered patents and intellectual property with lot of interesting anecdotes. Prof. Andrew talked about why open source is just great. These presentations generated a lot of audience questions too.
This was followed by Open Source TV and "lucky-dip". Two lucky winners walked away with iPod Shuffle. Enjoy the closing moments of open source mela right here:
Wednesday Mar 26, 2008
I caught up with Tirthankar Das in the hallway this afternoon. What does he think about the mela? See for yourself.
Wednesday Mar 26, 2008
Welcome to day 2 of open source mela. Day 2 started with a presentation from Joe George on "What every Sun employee should know about open source?". The presentation covered basics of open source and also addressed common myths about open source. Building and interacting with communities were also part of the presentation. The audience had lot of questions on legal/copyright aspects.
Some pictures from day 2:
Wednesday Mar 26, 2008
Here are the winning open source captions:
- "Source-related" (contributed by
Gopalakrishnan Sankaran): Freedom Matters, May the source be you, Let
the source be you, May the source be yours, Let the source be yours
- Contributed by Amol Chiplunkar: "Open Source Mela, IEC 2008... a chance to find your lost siblings"
- Contributed by Saurabh Vyas:
- Come all! Join the bandwagon of open source and add in your bit for this participation age!!
- OpenSource Mela - Calling all the hackers of the IEC: experience, explore & share
List of prize winners:
- Gopal Krishnan Sankaran
- Venkatraman C S
- Rohan Ranade
List of consolation prize winners:
- Srinivas K G
- Saurabh Vyas
- Amol Chiplunkar
Tuesday Mar 25, 2008
Mad-ad contest winners. Thanks to Sreelakshmi Padmanabhan for providing the information.
- First Prize: The Unknowns (Saurabh Vyas, Mayuresh Nirhali, Madhu KR)
- Second Prize: JavaFX Frontiers (Rakesh Menon,Srinivas Mandalika, Nizamudeen K
- Consolation prize: Voyagers (Vijay Upreti, Satyajit Tripati,Deepak Raja)
Acrostic puzzle winners. Thanks to Swathi Devulapalli for providing the information.
- First Prize: Rahimunnisa M
- Consolation Prizes: Sanjay Gianchandani, Sujit Nair, Gopalakrishnan Sankaran
Congratulations to all the prize winners!
Tuesday Mar 25, 2008
The prize distribution ceremony at the end of day 1 was a gala event. Watch this space for the names of winners. But you can enjoy the photos for now :-)
Tuesday Mar 25, 2008
If you have been wondering who got so creative with the open source mela posters and e-mails, meet the creative engineers of IEC - Pallavi Madhusudhan & Manu Samuel. It's not an easy task to design these posters or come up with e-mails soliciting participation. These posters have to convey the essence of open source, and at the same time must be catchy too. They had to fit this task in between their regular work and deliver them at short notice. Thank you so much, Pallavi and Manu!
Take a look at one of the posters they designed. This poster invites contributions for the mad-ads contest.
Tuesday Mar 25, 2008
This blog captures just 33% of the excitement! A bird's eye view of what happened so far. There are at least three parallel sessions going on at any point of time, so I am trying to report from what I attended. This is just 33% of the excitement.
Day 1 of the open source mela started at 10am today. KNR gave a presentation on the open source efforts going on in IEC. He talked about the "open source culture" and the importance of thinking and being in the open. The hall started filling in as soon as KNR started to talk. This was followed by Harish's talk on open source technologies.
At 11am, there was an interesting talk by SaiSatish Vedam on "Architectures, Code, and Law". Sai talked about copyrights, controlled environments, and coding. In a proprietary software environment, there is an inherent copyright associated with the code we create (and the comments on the source code). The software industry is at a crossroads in terms of our understanding of the legal aspects of coding. This is not so straightforward unlike other industries. A lot of real-life examples helped the audience relate to what Sai talked about. Open source software comes to the software industry's rescue in these cases. In the ground floor conference room, Suvendu Ray talked about Sun's open source initiative and gave tips on how to participate in the open source programs. Incidentally, Suvendu is also one of the "think tanks" of Sun's open source agenda in IEC.
The 4th floor yoga room and cafeteria were abuzz with activity. Participants tried their luck on "how much do you know about Sun" quizzes and got a chance to talk to the engineers working on today's bleeding edge technologies.
Tuesday Mar 25, 2008
The open source mela begins today. The IEC Times carried a news article this morning.
Tuesday Mar 25, 2008
Prof. Andrew Lynn of JNU, a very active crusader of open source will be in IEC to talk about "Why is open source important?".
As per Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, "No amount of fear can stop the rise of free media, or free software (they are the same, after all). The community is vastly more innovative and powerful than a single company. And you will never turn back the clock on elementary school students and developing economies and aid agencies and fledgling universities - or the Fortune 500 - that have found value in the wisdom of the open source community. Open standards and open source software are literally changing the face of the planet - creating opportunity wherever the network can reach."
Tuesday Mar 25, 2008
Bhavna Singh is providing in-house process expertise for open source.
When a product is planning to go open source, there are a lot of things to take care of. License restrictions and infringements are just two of them. How would you like if somone provides the required help to walk you through the whole process? Bhavna Singh provides this much needed expertise for IEC product teams. Hear Bhavna talk about open source review process.
Open source is the ideal development and business model for today's massively connected Participation Age economy. Why? Because it offers freedom to every user and developer by encouraging genuinely collaborative innovation. Open source software can lower customer barriers to: access, switching costs, and greater value achieved in an environment that allows for increased participation and competition. Companies gain compensation for their innovations by building on the contributions of others. Click here for more information.
Monday Mar 24, 2008
Portal Server enthusiasts will have a lot to rejoice in the open source mela. At least four talks around OpenPortal are planned.
- Manage content using Project Mirage by Joshna Kambalapalli: CMS is a system used to create, store, and manage content. Project Mirage is an open source CMS initiative from the Portal team based on a JSR-170 compliant content repository.
- Incorporating Workflow in applications using SAW (Simple API for Workflow) by Ganesh Ram: The Simple API for Workflow(SAW) is intended to offer a generic workflow API to perform human workflow interaction with various workflow engines. This generic workflow API will ship with a default implementation for Java Composite Application Platform Suite (JCAPS). The SAW is being consumed by other features (Example: OpenPortal and Project Mirage).
- In addition, talks on Dreamweaver Plugin (by Ganesh Ram, again) and SharePoint integration (by Murali Krishna Reddy) are planned.
Monday Mar 24, 2008
An interesting talk on NetBeans awaits those who are
planning to attend the open source mela. This talk on NetBeans
(intended primarily for engineers) by Rohan Ranade covers:
- NetBeans platform and architecture aspects
- Using NetBeans to build applications
This talk will be followed by a demo on checking out source code, compiling source code, and writing enhancements.
Rohan
has been working on the NetBeans platform for the last 1.5 years
primarily on the XML editing aspects. Rohan is a self-made NetBeans
evangelist.
Monday Mar 24, 2008
Meet IEC open source mela gaming guru Gopal + organizers Swathi Devulapalli & Tirthankar Das. Hear what they have to say about the mela and it's objectives:
- The mela is organized to bring in awareness on open source, and encourage IEC engineers to contribute to open source products
- Highlight the open source projects from IEC
- About 40 talks and 10 demos are planned over the next two days (3/25 and 3/26)
- A lot of fun contests and games are part of the mela too
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