After much to and fro, the official Call for Participation has been released on the FOSS.IN website.

This is it, folks. If you want to be a speaker at India’s biggest and most awaited Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) event, then it is time to move your Gluteus Maximus and submit your talk/workshop/tutorial/BoF/etc. proposal.

This year, the event (which is the successor to the enormously successful Linux Bangalore conferences) is bigger than ever, at a new venue (the Bangalore Palace), with a wider scope (all of FOSS, not just Linux), a new approach (topics, not tracks) and plenty of big-name speakers from all over the world.

But never mind the big-name speakers – the stars of the show will be the people from the Indian FOSS community. This is your chance to show the world what India is capable of on the FOSS development front.

If you are a student, especially if you are part of the VTU that has, in it’s infinite wisdom, scrapped projects from the curriculum, then you should pay special attention here. We believe that the future of FOSS lies in the hands of young people who are not yet jaded by the brutal demands of professional life. Nothing exemplifies this more than the origins of Linux itself – Linus Torvalds was a student at the University of Helsinki when he created Linux.

FOSS.IN/2005 is going to be the biggest technical event you will have ever seen, but it isn’t just technical stuff you will see there. Some of the topics you will see discussed are the FOSS community, effective advocacy, FOSS in Education, copyrights and patents, FOSS in culture, etc.

And if you are technically inclined, you can learn how to hack the kernel from actual kernel developers, tune up Linux and BSD servers and secure your networks, learn to hack Gnome and KDE to create mind-blowingly productive desktops, translate applications and OSs into your native languages, develop and optimise innovative next-generation systems and applications – all from the masters (who may not actually be much older than you!).

Get interested. Get involved. Change the world.

Because with Free & Open Source Software, you can.

And you will.