Foss.in: Free Open Source Software For The World

Foss.in, a conference dedicated to pooling together headliners and close followers of the FOSS (Free Open Source Software) movement, opened its doors at the National Science Symposium Center in Bangalore, India, on Friday. The crowd is slated to disperse throughout the world after three intensive days of workshops, discussions, orations, and demonstrations, ending today.

Two especially noteworthy keynotes will be presented at this year’s Foss.in: one by Sun Microsystems’ Moinak Ghosh, an individual partly responsible for Belenix, a project open-source to the core which intends to squeeze the 1.8 gigabytes of Sun’s Solaris to fit a standard 700MB compact disc; the other, IBM’s Suparna Bhattacharya, who is currently one of the top Linux kernel developers in India today.

Foss.in is a free event currently hosting one and a half thousand people, all congregating in brainstorming sessions and networking their way to address books of contacts that’ll take them through another year of FOSS development.

FOSS is more important than most people give it credit. In a world dominated by proprietary giants, FOSS is very useful out for getting productive when scraping the bottom of the bucket, so to speak. The quality shown by - and the attention given to – recent FOSS releases has impressed many long time skeptics (many are now referred to as former skeptics). Ubuntu is often seen as the poster-boy for the reason this shift has occurred.

Such a change doesn’t only mean the hours spent perfecting FOSS have now requited with admiration and appreciation, but this reinvigorated sector is sure to have many more new faces joining the fray in the months and years to come. This bodes extremely well for technologically-barren societies in “third world” locations around the globe and the flourishing swarm of DRM-detesting rebels that see “open” as the most preferred gateway to a bright future of adaptable solutions to our current collection of problems, many of whom are stubborn to let go of old-world, closed, this-or-that software.

What do I get out of the news coming out of Foss.in this year? Freedom and choice are good, they’re not a fad, and they’re not going away.

Click Here for a look at Foss.in’s schedule