foss.in 2006 is over. What did we benefit from that.

From the OpenSolaris front, I see its another milestone. When I compare with the foss conference held last year and this year, I see a drastic change in the foss community built around OpenSolaris in India.

     Last year, a change from Linux Bangalore to foss.in was a major step, but still many are of the preception that Linux is THE only opensource software and I saw this mindset in foss.in 2005 as well. Eventhough our demo stalls attracted many people, some were skeptic whether SUN is really serious about OpenSolaris. When I was demo-ing zones technology last time, I remember there were few hardcore geeks from Linux community who came to the stalls only to say Solaris sucks and never tried to understand what I am trying to demo. Slow-aris was still in their minds. We have to tell them lot has been changed since Solaris 7 or Solaris 8 (which they used once upon a time and made an opinion based on that) Solaris Express is leaps and bounds ahead when compared to S8. The BeleniX livecd, which was in the initial stages at the foss.in 2005 time, was given to everyone who came to the SUN stalls, so that people can get a feel of OpenSolaris without installing it. But many commented back saying whats big deal in making a livecd, BeleniX livecd is too slow it sucks etc. Many of the Linux geeks never visited SUN stalls (probably a different religion feeling). We made sure not to enter into religious wars (never even thought about it). We expected a hostile environment , but I should say, leaving few people aside, the response was really good.

Overall, I felt foss.in 2005 was just a name change rather than a mindset change.

What happened over this period?

Even though many hardcore Linux geeks never agreed to the fact that Solaris has changed a lot, we got a huge response from foss.in 2005. Many people joined BOSUG (Banglore Open Solaris User Group) and  lot more people showed interest in OpenSolaris.

BeleniX figured out in news papers. DeveloperIQ interviewing us. Got some focus around OpenSolaris.

College visits and requests from colleges to give talks on OpenSolaris.

Regular bosug meets which is now grown into the second largest OpenSolaris user group through out the world.

BOSUG is one of the most active alias and people who joined are enthusiastic about OpenSolaris technologies.

Anil Gulecha met with the team in one of the University visits to whom we offered a project to do liveusb.

I know how much did Moinak worked in background to make a person, who never worked on Solaris, to do this project.

All pieces are already there in BeleniX and with able guidance from Moinak and dedication from Anil made this easier.

Anil's example is motivating factor for other students who wants to pitch-in and do projects in OpenSolaris.

BeleniX, Anils contribution, foss, University visits etc are the success factors of the OpenSolaris in India over this period.

Allthough other User groups in India are not as active as bosug, I hope to see them active in near future.

We had lot more projects in BeleniX and OpenSolaris as well. Over this peroid of time BeleniX is also grown into a distribution as comparable to Knoppix in Linux world.

Just before foss, Anils column in TOI and aajtak interviewing Moinak were a boost.

foss.in 2006:

With all these developments over the period, I saw a trend change. People who visited SUN stalls last year, volunteered to man the demo booths. We had volunteers from outside SUN who demo-ed BeleniX. I saw few of the big shots stop-by our stall, understand what we are demo-ing. Many people were impressed by the ZFS demo. They had to accept ZFS is a last word in the filesystem.

Saw many students asking for speakers to their college fest at the conference. We developed a webpage for such requests.

http://in.sun.com/univ

I see big opportunity to students and for OpenSolaris to grow in India.

although foss.in is over, but the foss fever (particularly opensolaris) is still on.