I was out attending a two day National Conference on Open Source Software here in Ahmedabad, India. Sparing couple of inspiring talks by prominent FOSS speakers, the entire event was a shame, I am sure the organizers worked very hard putting this event together, however as one participant put it “M$ would have done far better job of executing the event”.

There were two workshops on the second day, I attended “Development track” part, it is best that I do not mention anything about it.

I would like two days of my life back.

On the bright side, Ankit Patel who is leading a team of translators at Red Hat has promised to help with Gujarati translations of Compiz-Fusion, met up with one of our heroes C Umashankar who singlehandedly migrated the entire Tamilnadu State IT infrastructure(over 40000 desktops and servers) to SUSE Linux. We need more people like him around.

There were couple of guys from Mozilla foundation, Seth Bindernagel and Chris Hofmann who made a good impression about Mozilla’s role in making web experience better and safer. Switch to Firefox if you already haven’t.

Another good thing that was highlighted (although most participants lost it by that time) was http://www.icosindia.com/ initiative that would help nurture students interest in open standards and building open source applications for various industry verticals.

Hopefully, Novell will participate in the event next year and will be more appropriate to the name “National Conference”.