For those who came in late (or were just living under a rock for a while):

FOSS.IN in India’s largest and probably best known Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) conferences, and is now spoken about as one of the the four primary, grassroot-level FOSS conferences in the world, the other three being being linux.conf.au, OLS and linuxconf.eu.

The conference sees thousands of participants coming together from across India and from many parts of the world, to listen to talks on cutting edge FOSS technologies, given by leading FOSS developers and contributors from across the world. They also participate in discussions, BoFs, workshops and just a lot of honest-to-goodness fun, meeting people, exchanging ideas, hatching plans for world domination.

FOSS.IN differs from other conferences by being completely developer and contributor focused. There are no “preaching to the choir” evangelism talks, no bandwidth-robbing introductory talks, no boring “I could have read this on the web” talks – this conference is hard-core developer/contributor oriented.

FOSS.IN will help professional and student developers, who have development experience but no prior FOSS experience, to become successful FOSS contributors, by exposing them to the minds of some of the most brilliant developers in the world. They will learn about cutting edge technologies that come out of the FOSS community to literally change the world, and they will learn what it is like to work in a team of geographically dispersed people.

And existing FOSS developers and contributors will get together and fine-tune ideas and projects, learn new and interesting ways to change the world they live in, and help new developers to come up to speed.

The newly introduced Project Days give you a chance to get involved with eight of the most talked about FOSS projects on the planet, and will learn to contribute to them.

But most of all, participants at FOSS.IN have an unbelievable amount of fun.

At FOSS.IN, you are not artificially kept at the fringe by unreal, self-serving commercial interests – you are mainstream. This is one of the most anticipated technical events every year, and there is a good reason for this.

So how do you participate?

Simple.

If you are a FOSS developer/contributor, you should submit proposals for sessions for the Project Days and/or the Main conference. But you better hurry up – the last date for submission is October 8th, 2007.

If you are not (yet) a FOSS developer/contributor and want to learn how to be one, you attend the event as a delegate – i.e. part of of the audience of thousands of people who are there to learn, interact and have fun.

If you are an organization that would like to see India producing more and more FOSS contributors, whose razor sharp skills will also show up in their work in your organization, then you should consider sponsoring the event. While many of the sponsor slots are already filled, there is room for a few more.

And finally, if you are a member of the FOSS community, and want to be at one of the most happening (technically and socially) FOSS events in the world, then make sure you have your calendar marked for December 4th through 8th, 2007.

We guarantee that you will have the time of your life.

You can find lots of information about the event on the FOSS.IN website.

See you at FOSS.IN/2007!