Hello,
The minutes of the last ILUG-Delhi meeting, held on 18th Feb., at
Sarai, CSDS, are included here. Sorry for the delay in posting them.
I am also afraid that this is a rather long message.
The meeting was attended by fifteen people, and involved fairly
rambunctious discussions. Here are the highlights:
1. ILUG-Delhi / Linux-Asia (LA) co-operation: There were three main
points expressed from ILUG-D's side with respect to the snafu with
LA2007:
(a) The unilateral announcement of the list of speakers from LFY's
side, after an agreement to let ILUG-D organise the technical
track, and invite speakers.
(b) While ILUG-D representatives were invited to be on the FOSS-i
advisory panel, decisions were made and statements issued on the
behalf of FOSS-i, without consulting the ILUG-D people.
(c) The original word from LFY was that Microsoft might be an event
sponsor, but would focus on the chief executive (CXO) track. As
is widely known now, Microsoft was a major sponsor, and involved
in all aspects.
After further argument, it was questioned as to why LA was even
interested in community participation, given their track record at
providing space, and representation for community organisations at
the event. It was pointed out that not only ILUG-D, but other
community representatives who had attended LA2006 stayed away from
this year's event.
Niraj Sahay from Linux For You (LFY) was there to represent their
side of things. While his fortitude in braving an anti-LA crowd is
appreciated, he had very few answers to provide. His main response to
the above points was that this year's event had been organised in a
hurry, and that he would see to it that from now on LFY participates
regularly in ILUG-Delhi meetings, and works with the community. He
also admitted that LA's main need for the community was due to
pressure from outside visitors to the event, who have decried the
lack of community participation.
So, all in all, while ILUG-D will keep an open mind as to future
collaboration, the scope for this seems rather limited. It remains
to be seen whether LFY lives up to their promise of ongoing
participation in the LUG throughout the year, as opposed to just when
LA rolls around.
2. Microsoft involvement in FOSS events was also discussed, in
particular, whether Microsoft sponsorship of Freedel would be
acceptable, if they abided by the current ILUG-D consensus against
the demonstration and advertising of open-source software. There
were strong opinions expressed both for, and against such
sponsorship. The main thrust of the pro- argument was that other
companies (IBM, Sun, etc., at least in India) were as much against
open-source software as Microsoft, and that of the con- argument was
that top-level Microsoft executives continued to openly express
antipathy to open-source software. Finally, a consensus agreement was
reached to evaluate the acceptability of prospective sponsors as per
the following guidelines:
(a) The existing rule of no closed-source software demonstrated or
advertised at the event.
(b) No companies that have currently active policies against
open-source software, or publicly express opposition to it.
(c) Any borderline cases to be decided upon by a committee of
ILUG-Delhi representatives.
3. E-zine: This has largely been held up due to delay on my side in
providing access to Atul Jha. Atul described some ideas for the first
issue, and has also agreed to make a project plan publicly available
(see action items at the end).
4. Kamal Dave expressed a desire to present a plan for using open
standards for digital certificate signing in India. He also expressed
the rather intriguing opinion that US patents, including those for
software, are now valid in India, as per some recent agreement signed
between the two governments. He has been asked to prepare a summary
of these two ideas, including links to relevant news stories (see
action items at the end.
5. The purpose of the LUG, and the kind of activities it should
participate in were debated. In this area, the possibility of working
with the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation (RGF) in providing FOSS solutions to
schools in rural areas of Rajasthan was brought up, and it was agreed
that representatives from ILUG-D would meet with the RGF.
It was also widely felt that the LUG should be more involved in
educational activities, and in providing FOSS support. This could
include 2-3 day events, end-user training, as well as a "training the
trainers" programme. It was decided to contact the NRCF again for
such possibilities, along the lines of earlier discussions.
6. There was a debate on when to have Freedel 2007. On one hand, it was
seen as advantageous to have an event as soon as possible, in order
to leverage the lack of community participation in LA2007, while on
the other hand, it was felt that the event would need to happen
within 4-6 weeks in order to take maximum benefit of the LA2007
fiasco. As this was not felt that this was feasible, we agree to have
this year's event at the end of September (most likely, Sat./Sun.,
28th/29th), and to start planning, and publicity now. An initial
project plan will be drawn up this Fri., 23/2. In the interim, we
will try to have mini-events, or even more informal get-togethers.
From the next year onwards, Freedel will move to the fixed time of
the 2nd week of February.
7. Supreet Sethi gave a nice introduction to grabbing data from web
pages, and parsing them for meaningful content, using a variety
of parsing libraries in Python. This included actual demos of working
code, which will be made available in the public domain.
There are two technical talks planned for the next ILUG-Delhi
meeting, scheduled for Sun., 18th March. These are: (a) The talk
by Kapil Dua that was originally scheduled for this month, and
(b) A talk on open-source machine learning methods by Soumya Sir
from JNU. So, circle the date on your calendar.
8. Action items:
Gora Mohanty: Provide access to Drupal site for Atul.
Due Tue., 21/2.
Atul Jha: Project plan write-up for e-zine.
Due Tue., 28/2.
Atul Jha: Post information about college events (that he wanted
ILUG-D participation in) to this list.
Due Thu., 22/2.
Kamal Dave: Post write-up with relevant links to: (a) Use of
proprietary standards in digital certificate signing in
India, and (b) US software patents being validated in
India.
Due Sat., 24/2.
Raj Mathur: Recover data on original plan for Freedel in Feb.,
2007, so that it can be modified for use in Sep., 2007.
Due noon, Thu., 22/2.
Regards,
Gora
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