On Tue, 2010-12-28 at 11:32 +0530, Gaurav Paliwal wrote: > > foss.in tried to create a caste structure in the Indian foss > community. > > It created a lot of trouble, but fortunately it failed. It's > proprietor > > has finally realised that no sensible person will buy his goods and > has > > retired and shut down his circus. > > > > I can't comment on this as I never attended any of the foss.in event.
neither have I > The > previous point that I made "This is to tell you what foss.in has > achieved" > was based on this : > http://www.slideshare.net/aanjhan/keynote-at-fossin-2010. what does this prove? The author of this was not introduced to foss by foss.in - he was introduced by Chennai LUG. The proprietor of foss.in has a theory that LUGs are irrelevant, mailing lists are irrelevant and any contribution other than code is 'low lying fruit' and not worthy of mention. That is why he has shut down the Bangalore LUG, made all his mailing lists non-functional. The reason why foss is growing is that unlike the proprietary software process, foss does not distinguish between contributors and users. Every contributor is a user and every user contributes in some way or the other - maybe with documentation, translation, code, bug reports, feature requests, howtos, tutorials, asking questions on mailing lists and IRC, providing answers to the questions and, most important - advocacy, recruiting new users and training those users by conducting seminars, workshops and exhibtions. And by this process the community is developed and the application is developed. And the most important component is USERS. Where would firefox be without it's millions of users? The author claims that foss.in has produced a couple of Gsoc students. Did it? Where do the Gsoc students come from? who introduced them to foss in the first place? You will find that the majority of Gsoc students were introduced to foss by the LUGs, FSUGs and other opensource and free software groups - as USERS in the first place. Kerala and Tamilnadu have produced the majority of them - because the LUGs are very active at the grass root level. I can predict that the NCR will produce many of these because of the activities of this LUG and it's members. Any attempt to separate developers from users is anti foss. Yes, foss.in has achieved something - it has smashed the Bangalore foss community which was one of the most vibrant in India. Nothing more - and the fact that it is now defunct shows it's relevance. -- regards KG http://lawgon.livejournal.com Coimbatore LUG rox http://ilugcbe.techstud.org/ -- l...@iitd - http://tinyurl.com/ycueutm
