This has *got* to be the most hilarious backfire *ever*!

As you must have probably heard, Microsoft has commissioned Parikrama to write a song on an emergency basis, to be pubicised and performed during the Microsoft-hijacked MAIT event on the 9th of December at Bangalore Palace, in the august presence of Sir Bill Gates. You can read the lyrics of the song here – notice the line “Opens all the windows, as he shuts the door”.

Well, it didn’t take long for people to figure out what’s going on. In a recent discussion on the FOSS.IN/2005 Mailing List, Phenom‘s LB/2002 version of “Linux Can!” was discussed, and of course the song was downloaded a gadzillion times.

When news of the Microsoft song “leaked” (yeah, right!), people showed that they had figured out the connection – today alone, “Linux Can!” has been downloaded dozens of times, but more importantly, Phenom’s own album Unbound has seen a massive increase in downloads – in fact so many times that it has eclipsed all previous daily download figures! Talk about voting with your feet.

Phenom will be performing an updated version of “Linux Can!” at FOSS.IN/2005 – be there to cheer them on! And when the Parikrama/Microsoft song comes out on the 9th, be sure to compare that with this song (and of course the other Phenom songs).

And for hardnosed Phenom fans – Phenom told me this evening that they are ready with their new material and can begin recording now – but more importantly they are going to perform some of the new songs at the gig on the 2nd!

In 2002, MS attempted to buy themselves a country for $400 Million, and failed.

Think they can buy it now, for a song?

We are 7 days away from FOSS.IN/2005. Preparations are at fever pitch, and I am all about ready to collapse.

Registrations are pouring in (we crossed 1000 sometime last week), and the number of hits on the FOSS.IN website are staggering.

I am sitting here wearing the conference T-Shirt, which is very nice, and for a change fits me!

And I just tried out the prototype of the DVD that we plan to distribute at the event – the mother of all distributions. We are going to set the bar extremely high for all those people who are still copying the same old tired format of distro CDs that my team and I had introduced to the world in 1996 and improved on over the years till 2001. After this DVD, the world will never be the same for magazines putting out disks on their covers. Many thanks to Shanu who has been working overtime on this.

Various teams are working on various aspects of the event. The network team has their stuff ready for deployment, assuming (of course) that the servers and machines are delivered in time. Harikrishnan has been pumping out graphics, posters and even ads (coming soon to a newspaper near you). Gopi and his team have been working on the venue stuff, and Shreyas and I have been fighting battle after battle with the talk schedules.

As with every year, speakers drop out without much notice, to be quickly replaced from a reserve pool. I can always tell when someone isn’t going to actually give a talk – it usually starts with them not sending in slides by the due date. So far, I have yet to be proven wrong.

I have found out one important thing about myself – I don’t scale. And I get disappointed easily. It is a heartache every year when people you thought you could rely on turn to have different priorities from mine, despite their claims otherwise. You end up doing more work than you expected to, and none of it is quite complete, resulting in dissatisfaction all around.

And it isn’t just people who let you down. You won’t believe how hard it is to get the industry, who derives so much revenue and technology from Free & Open Source Software, to support the only national-level FOSS event (i.e. not a commercial “Linux” event) we have. It isn’t that we haven’t got sponsors, but the battle to get people to open their purses is something I am getting very tired of after five years of having to do this. Doesn’t this industry ever learn? I mean, just now I had one potential sponsor *bargaining* for a reduction in sponsorship, to the tune of few thousand Rupees!

If it wasn’t for the support I get from most unexpected quarters (including the Indian Government), and if it wasn’t for growth and promotion of something that I so strongly believe in and have been promoting for more than a decade now, I don’t know if I would be doing this at all.

But in the end, if just 10 Indians out of the many thousands who will come to FOSS.IN/2005 get enthused enough to start contributing to FOSS, it will have all been worth it. And, if like Swaroop, more and more students find out that companies look for people who have done things while they were students, instead of looking at marks, then India should certainly see less of technoslavery and more of innovation.

In what amounts to an endorsement of FOSS, the Visvesvaraya Technological University, Karnataka’s main technology education university, to which almost all technical colleges in Karnataka are affiliated, issued a letter today to all principals and HODs of almost 120 engineering colleges, urging them to encourage their students to attend FOSS.IN/2005.

You can see the letter here.

Among other things, this means that we are beginning to see a massive change happening, as the VTU (and Anna University in neighbouring Tamil Nadu) begin to actively push for involvement in FOSS.

For me, this is both a personal, as well as community victory. Personal, because the VTU is located in Belgaum – the town I grew up in after we migrated to India – and community, because while this certainly doesn’t mean that we have won the war, we certainly have people’s attention.

There are numerous Education related talks and tutorials at FOSS.IN/2005 – including a talk on the Anna University’s FOSS curriculum and formal technical courses. This, along with the presence of Government and other important stakeholders, means that for the first time ever, this country will see the FOSS world and the education world meeting at the table to discuss things.

Hopefully, this will mean the beginning of rationalisation of technical education, and people going back to learning open technologies instead of closed products.

As for the students so happily affected by this most welcome turn of events – you are going to have the time of your lives. And get attendance for it, too!

Ten years after first attempting to get Linux out to the public, one has had one’s failures and one’s victories.

Today was one of the victory days.

The newspaper announces the official Indian National Portal, put together by the Government of India with the NIC and the Department of Information Technology.

It works really well, has tons of well organised information, and is a great sign of things to come. Very clean design, excellent formatting, and lots of useful information.

And for some strange reason, after being subjected to government site after government site that only works with Internet Explorer, this site works flawlessly with Mozilla Firefox and any other browser I threw at it.

This needed some digging.

And the results blew me away.

India’s National Government portal server runs on Linux.

Not only that – the site is built with the world’s favourite web scripting language – PHP – that just happens to be Free & Open Source Software as well.

I almost jumped out of my chair and saluted.

This was almost like a declaration of national digital independence.

Am I proud, or what?

Bah!

For years, I have had problems with LCD projectors and my notebook. My notebook’s native resolution is 1400×1050 (like many high-end notebooks manufactured after 2002), and putting it into a non-native resolution upsets the notebook’s belief in good and evil. Changing my resolution to 1024×768 simply doesnt work – the projector just won’t accept the image.

This has often resulted in my having to switch to 640×480 mode just to get a full screen image out. The most recent incident was at the CXOtoday event in Mumbai and Delhi, where the projectors just refused to play ball.

The issue is always that there is too little time to do any R & D at the venue, so one adapts, instead of fixing things. I know that it is just a question of frequencies, but, well, there is no time.

It’s gotten so bad that I was considering buying a lower-end notebook that can only do 1024×768!

Now you may say “yeah, that’s because Linux doesn’t work”, but note that this problem persisted even when I booted into Windows. Exchanging notes with Kishore Bhargava showed that he had similar problems, with a similar notebook (for some reason, the two of us always end up buying the same/similar notebook, mobile phone, notebook bag, etc., even when we don’t meet for ages).

So I decided I am going to do something about it, by spending some money hiring a projector and doing some R & D at home over the long weekend.

And guess what? Projector after projector delivered to me worked out of the box at any resolution! I am unable to hire a projector that fails like the projectors that I used even last week! It’s like all vendors have suddenly decided to buy better projectors!

So here I am, looking at a 8 foot image of my screen, with nothing to do.

And want to bet that the next time I give a talk somewhere, the projector will bomb out on me again, refusing to work with my notebook?

This is ridiculous!

We opened up delegate registrations for FOSS.IN/2005 yesterday, and if anyone had any doubts about interest in the event, he may now put those doubts to rest. This year’s event is going to have the largest audiences ever.

In case you missed the second list of talks, go have a look. This is the highest number of talks, tutorials, workshops and bofs ever, beating the previous record of 96 by almost 100%.

25 days to go. If you plan to be there, help us estimate required resources by registering now.

In 1999, we were battling to get recognition for the Linux and FOSS community in business circles. Repeated attempts at getting the community included in various industry events had not met with any success.

At a party at a friend’s place a year earlier, I met Sanjoy Das Gupta, who a little while later became Karnataka’s first IT Secretary. I met him several times over the next year, and each time told him more about Linux and FOSS – at his own prompting. He was fascinated with the concept, and being a non-technical guy, kept using the phrase “this is the real magic”.

When IT.COM 99 was announced, I asked Sanjoy if there was some way that the Linux community (as we were known then) could get involved. Clearly, we would need two things – Bangalore IT.COM’s permission to exhibit at an event that had Microsoft as a prominent exhibitor, and a sponsor to pay for what we did.

In August 1999, at our regular Bangalore Linux Users Group meeting, I brought up this point, and asked people to come up with ideas. One guy from the back stood up and came forward – Sanjoy Das Gupta, who had sneaked into the meeting a few minutes earlier. He came to the podium, talked to the BLUG, and asked us what we needed. We told him a stall would be nice. He replied “A stall? I will give you a pavilion”. He also spoke a bit about how important he considered Linux in the Indian context – surprising many people sitting in the audience with his clear understanding about the concepts of FOSS.

We were sceptical – words are cheap, but Sanjoy lived up to his promise. Not only did we get an entire Linux Pavilion, with the Linux community occupying the place of honour right in the center, but thanks to sponsorship we received from PCQuest, we were given just about every resource we needed to make it the most popular pavilion at the expo. Organisers kept announcing on the PA “Please keep moving – there are many other pavilions apart from the Linux pavilion” which had us in splits. The Times of India called us “The Crown Jewel of Bangalore IT.COM 99″.

On one of the days, I came back from lunch, to find the central portion of the pavilion *so* crowded with visitors that I just couldnt get in. Which was OK with me, the community was handling things splendidly, and they didn’t really need me. But I watched one guy struggling to get in there to see things, and he just couldn’t manage. I decided to go help him, and patted him on the shoulder to get his attention. He turned around, and it was Sanjoy. And far from being upset about his predicament, he was grinning from ear to ear. He was thrilled with the response we were getting.

Figures later showed that almost 150,000 people had gone through the Linux pavilion over the course of the event – an unbelievable success, and the thing that launched the Indian Linux and FOSS community into the limelight.

We have never looked back since, and IT.COM 99, and Sanjoy’s grand gesture, were a stepping stone that eventually resulted in Linux Bangalore and now FOSS.IN, allowing us to reach thousands of people and spread the FOSS message.

This morning, I woke up to see the a news item in the paper: Sanjoy Das Gupta had passed away after suffering a heartattack, at the age of 51.

Not many people know how much we owe Sanjay for doing what he did in 1999. Sure, people who don’t really understand things will say “he was just being a politician”, but those of us who knew what he did know that this was not the case. He genuinely believed in the same things we did.

I’d like to put on record that the FOSS community owes him a debt of gratitude, and that he was living proof of the fact that you do not have to be a developer to contribute to FOSS.

Thank you, Sanjoy Das Gupta.

And yes, this is the real magic.

If you are a user of BSNL’s DataOne Broadband service, run (don’t walk) to

http://dobs.sourceforge.net

Download, configure, be amazed, be very amazed.

In short, this is a script to capture and calculate your Dataone Usage from Dataone’s unhelpful Usage site.

Lots of options, well written. And excellent documentation included as well.

Kudos to Aravind SV – make sure to send him a thank you message.

I have only tried the Linux version. Gaurav tried the Windows version, and reports success as well.

Good stuff, and please note – it’s Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)

BTW – I am being flooded with requests for help for Dataone setups. I’d love to help, guys, but I simply don’t have the time. You should *really* be going to VinuThomas.com and check out the forums there – lots of people, lots of help.

Some of the international speakers coming to FOSS.IN/2005 can be found here.

I am in Mumbai on Tuesday, and New Delhi on the 27th, speaking at this event. If you are there, do drop by and say hello.

I think Bangalore has finally managed to achieve a new level of badness – complete incompatibility with me.

I have noticed, over the past few years, that everytime I travel out of Bangalore, my allergies, sinusitis and frequent attacks of the sniffles just disappear. But as soon as I land back here, I am sneezing again.

Case in point – on the 19th I was all day in Delhi. Over the days before this trip, I was suffering badly, but the second I wasout of Bangalore, all symptoms simply disappeared, only to re-appear when I landed back in Bangalore that night!

On the 25th, I am off to Bombay to give a keynote address at CXOlinux’s “Linux Wins” Seminar, and then again at the Delhi instance of the same event on the 27th, to impress CxOs with the need to understand and adopt Free & Open Source Software.

I am going to carefully observe how things go – and if I again see this miraculous disappearance of the sneezes, I am moving to Mysore or Goa for the rest of my life!

Oh Bangalore, what have you become?