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Then I drifted between several talks, trying to meet interesting people and gauge their knowledge. One of the goals my employer has for sending its people to various conferences is to meet and recruit IT talent. It wasn't long before I found several passionate developers who have an interest in topics relevant to Directi's .pw business unit such as microblogging and social networking.
As it turned out several presenters had left without notice so I was lucky to get a spot in the main hall. The audience for my talk seemed to be well over one hundred. As is the case in India today, very few attendees seemed to have any experience with Free Software and Open Source projects. I'm slowly but surely making it my mission to promote open source among the vast Indian software developer community. The post-talk questions I received were mostly about basic concepts such as licensing: What is the "best" license? What are BSD/GPL/MIT/etc? What is Copyleft? Oh, and I got an invite to come talk at a company in Pune, which could be interesting.
I'm curious about the upcoming FOSS.in conference. Hopefully these events reach a wide audience and help percolate knowledge of open source and free software throughout the IT field in India. At the moment I feel that there is a disproportionate lack of contributorship coming out of India. Once more developers across the subcontinent discover the world of open source and participate in such projects, we are sure to see great things!
Special mention should be made for the wonderful tshirts designed by Directi specially for this event. The "PHP - Pretty Hot Programmer" shirts were a hit!
All in all a successful day trip. And we had lots of fun in the Porsche on the way back. ;-)