OK, am back from Trivandrum, where I had a great time at the Workshop on Free and Open Software.

Reached there on the 6th, after an uneventful flight (apart from some nailbiting during the halt at Cochin – I fully expected to see an incoming bazooka…..;) and settled into Hotel Horizon to get ready for my talk the next day.

BTW – nice hotel, and *great* food! But no StarTV channels worth mentioning. However, a strange and mysterious channel called “Rosebowl” showed unbelievably good rock concerts and related stuff.

The next day, after some confusion with the car that was to take me to the venue, I arrived to at ER&DC after missing the first few talks. Found a couple of familiar names that I was finally able to attach faces to – Dr.Nagarjuna from TIFR Mumbai (with whom I have exchanged flames in the past, but who is a really nice guy in real life , and C. V. Radhakrishnan (CVR for short) who is another regular from the Linux lists.

My talk was the first one after lunch, and while I did manage to overshoot my time slightly, I was happy to see a lot of interest both in the general audience as well as in the Government people attending the event.

Later that day, a panel discussion was held on the viability of free and open software for E Governance. I did my usual rant about the term “Digital Divide” (I totally refuse to recognise the term, because it is interpreted as “can run Microsoft Word and cannot run Microsoft Word” by most people – more on that in an upcoming article).

After that there was a lively discussion about why the Government (central and state) should (and won’t) use OpenSource software. It was most gratifying to see the central government representative taking a stand for OpenSource and against the “X state government tying up with Y corporation, USA, for eGovernance software”.

More on that too in an upcoming article (woah! major material here!)

Attended the next day’s morning session, where Nagarjun and I found ourselves on the same side fighting someone who was propagating the BSD license as being the “best” license, completely ignoring some hard facts of reality (still more article material!

Finally shot off to the airport to catch my flight back. On the airport, a security guard took fancy to my little pair of moustache scissors that I always carry, and impounded it in the name of “security”. After entering it in the register, the item promptly disappeared, was never put on the plane, and is almost certainly a newly acquired item in the security guard’s bathroom.

It isn’t that this item was very expensive in terms of money, but it *was* important to me from the sentimental point of view, as it was given to me by my father some 20 years ago.