Hi folks,
This mail is meant more for the folks who missed the fun today.... Fasten you seat
belts, here we go....
--Indra.
YAWHATM -- Yet Another What Happened At Today's Meeting
==============================================
14th November will go down in the annuls of ILUG-Cal as a historic one. Today we had
the largest number of first
timers attending the meeting, far outstripping the old-timers as far as the numbers
go. However not all was lost and in
keeping with the great tradition...once again Indra turned up late... his
post-Bangalore makeover look coming in
for a bit of peer-review ;-)
We moved to our regular roosting place on the Rock...ie Room # 37....The absence of
the Official Umbrella was sorely
missed. Its Keeper was threatened with physical violence till he cowed down and
promised to ensure its presence in
future... Come on Patha-da... you are loosing it man! ;-)
Those who walked in late included Indrajit and Rutvik... apparently Indrajit has
managed to get over his "laziness" and
decided to join us.... May the source be with you!
We started off with a round of introduction about ourselves, how long each of us have
worked with/on Linux etc. Some
time into the meeting, the great bulk of Inigo (aka Ignatius) appeared in the
doorway.... suddenly the room didn't look
so big ;-)
This meeting was important as it was the first real meeting since August (September
--> Linux-Interact '99, meetings
were not held, in October only 4 people turned up). Basically we had an one-point
agenda -- to disclose the "secret"
event I have been hinting for some time, and enlist the support of members to go ahead
with this program. The
event is to organise a seminar/expo centering around the visit of ESR (Eric S.
Raymond) to India, or rather
specifically to Calcutta for the first time.
The Background Info
----------------------------
Exactly a month back, Amlan (who is also an active member of Singapore LUG) informed
me that Singapore LUG was planning
on getting ESR to come and give the keynote address at the 2nd Singapore Linux
Conference and Expo being planned
between 8 - 11 March, 2000. Singapore LUG will be picking up the tabs for ESR's air
ticket from San Francisco -->
Singapore --> San Francisco. He suggested that if we are interested we could have ESR
in between his arrival and
return. In which case we would have to pay for the business class return air ticket
from Calcutta to Singapore.
I discussed the matter with the informal ILUG-Cal core group (consists of the more
active members of the LUG), and we
decided to go ahead. But it was a rather uphill task as we would have to plan for a
big budget event ... something like
50k+ (Linux-Interact had cost us only about 4.5k, thanks to our host SXC, who had
waived all charges towards the SXC
auditorium). Apart from the money an event of this scale would require a lot of
planning and organisation, media
contacts and interaction with the industry, and that too months in advance.
My visit to the IT.COM '99 in Bangalore was partially from the reason so that I could
sound out and enlist the help of
other Linux-India members (particularly the people who are the driving force behind
LI). While I was away, there were
developments taking place in Calcutta. On my return I was greeted with the good news
that we have semi-secured pledges
to the tune of Rs 25k already. At last we were ready to move ahead.
And now back to our meeting
------------------------------------------
The idea of getting ESR was warmly recieved by all the members who have been using
Linux for a long time and thus fully
familiar with the contribution of ESR with regard to Open source movement and
advocacy.
Our discussions veered into the realms of difference between the different License
models that are frequently
encountered upon... it was marked by excited debates and explanation. Shanker took the
lead in explaining the finer
points of difference between these. Maybe for the first time in all our meetings we
really discussed about Open source,
FSF, Stallman, Bruce Perens, ESR.... the legal aspects of OSS and its point of view
wrt IP rights. The license model of
the beta of Corel's forthcoming distro drew a lot of flak from the die-hard Open
Source fanatics. Rohit -- one of our
new members, had lots of interesting questions ... like why we preferred Linux above
other operating systems.
Discussions also bordered along the lines of points of difference between the OSes wrt
their organisation and
architecture.
We wrapped up today's session by 7PM.... One last appeal was made to all present to
come forward and work towards the
successful planning and execution of bringing ESR to India and organising the
Seminar/Expo. The members who had stayed
on till the end were handed the Linux-India badges as promised by Indra, they were
also regaled with stories and
anecdotes from IT.COM in Bangalore. In the retrospective the meeting was a *very* dry
one.... we couldn't manage to get
any tea/coffee during or after the meeting....another first if I may say so ;-)
Well thats almost it.... one last thing -- the list of attendee penguins in
alphabetical order :--
1. B. Ali Mirza (parser failed while decoding handwriting ;-)
2. Darshan Shah
3. Dhruv Narula
4. Dibyendu Dey
5. Ignatius Nayan D'Rozario
6. Indrajit Raychaudhuri
7. Indranil Das Gupta
8. Malay Mitra
9. Partha Pratim Ghosh
A. Prateek Sureka
B. Raja Das
C. Rajat Patni
D. Rohit Dutt
E. Rutvik Doshi
F. Shanker R. Swaminathan
10. Soumit Mukherjee
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