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FUDCon Delhi 2006 Report

By RahulSundaram on 2006-02-21

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FUDCon Delhi 2006 was organized as part of LinuxAsia in Feb 9th 2006.
Though it is supposedly a business focused events it has been
overwhelmed by students and other developers interested in all sorts of
things. Foss.in still seems to do a better focusing on developers and
the community if thats where your interests are.  We have a full day of
Fedora speeches and presentations on the main auditorium and I believe
we did a decent job with it in getting a number of people interested and
some of them have even show up here as Fedora Ambassadors. The
auditorium was generally packed during the day and getting thinner in
the day leading to low amount of crowd during the end of the day Fedora
BOF which otherwise might have turned out to be more interesting in
relative terms.

The original startover from Venky and Alolita was fairly generic
followed by a inspiration speech from Greg Dek. Chris Blizzard who leads
the desktop team within Red Hat talked about the desktop changes and
gaps in two different presentations. Kishore Bhargava gave a update on
what was happening within the community in terms of LUG's and open
source developers in India. Sankarshan from Red Hat Bangalore rehashed
my general introduction presentation on Fedora with his own interesting
quirks.  Colin Charles who used to lead the Fedora marketing effort is
now on MySQL as the community manager and was fairly upbeat on MySQL and
Fedora presentation with changes like MySQL 5 finally landing in Fedora
Core 5. Ramakrishna Reddy from the Red Hat Engineering team and my
office colleague Ankit Patel, language maintainer - Gujarati gave a
combined presentation on L10N which was well received. Satish Mohan had
an update on what Red Hat Engineering has been doing in Bangalore which
includes working on odd devices such as dotmatrix printers and scanners
(<a href="http://oss-drivers.sourceforge.net/">http://oss-drivers.sourceforge.net/</a>) that organizations refuse to move
off from.  I had to brush over my presentation rapidly to leave room for
the final panel discussion on Fedora since Klaus Knopper of Knoppix fame
took his own time during noon for a verbose and broad presentation on
where we are heading towards in terms of appliances, software patents
and such.  The BOF had various ideas thrown about back and forth between
the audience and people in the stage and many thought it went well.

Pics and videos are on the pipeline. Anyone has them, get them out.

We had a Fedora booth running on all three days - 8,9 and 10th in
LinuxAsia manned by many people in Red Hat Delhi and Bangalore offices
attracting hundreds of people in a daily basis.  Tejas was doing the
videos. Kevin Verma showed up everywhere. We gave away thousands of
goodies like Free DVD's of  Fedora Core 4 an t-shirts.  There were many
introductory basic questions around how Fedora relates to RHEL, the
licensing terms, how we sustain it, the schedule and roadmaps. There is
a lot of interest and goodwill  in the project out there which could be
turn out into contributions if we figure out more means to do it.

I think we came away with the idea that driving changes towards getting
individual CD's for people on low bandwidth connections and Live CD
would be useful. The traditional way of throwing away packages to slim
down Fedora wouldnt work for us since we already have a large existing
userbase to worry about. Figuring out a reorganization that does what we
are already doing for the existing users while giving a desktop or
server or any other odd ball combination within individual CD's with the
help of tools like Kadischi seems to be the way forward.

We havent been doing a good job in getting users aware of the existing
features or the changes we helped drive within Fedora.  The handout that
we gave way on the Fedora stall helped in a large way towards that in
the conference though we might have included that in the LinuxAsia kit
too.We just have to keep doing what we are doing and use the material
that piles up on a regular basis and organize it. The good thing in
Fedora is that we get to do it every six months or so and every new
release gets a lots of attention in the form of downloads, new users,
negative criticisms and praise. Helping the community involved in a more
open fashion and communicating both within the project and to the
interested users and everyone out there is what we need and what are
going to continue doing. Others feel free to pitch in with their own
comments.
--
Rahul

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