So I deleted my Twitter account and joined on to Indentica. Identica runs on the AGPL'ed Laconica and I am hoping Rakesh keeps his promise of packaging it for Fedora sometime soon.

Recently the fedora-india list saw a raging debate on the legitimacy of Web sites like Fedora India, which try to distance themselves from the upstream project through disclaimers like:
"Copyright (c) 2008 Kulbir Saini. I am not related to Red Hat or
Fedora Project. The content on this site is my own views."
... and yet continue to use a domain and Web site name which suggest otherwise.

It all started when Kushal brought up the issue, sparking a few clarifications from the owner of the domain.

To me the issue is not about whether someone has taken permission to use the logo or not. Whether or not someone is employed by Red Hat or a part of the Fedora Project [1] also looks completely tangential to the discussion.

The point is can someone claim to use such a domain as his own personal space to write about a community supported project, when he is not even a part of the Indian Fedora community.

Can someone who is earning good money by working on Fedora [1] still claim that he is not part of it?

This reminds me of something too familiar, but I am not sure whether it will be good to have more of them.

--

[1] Kulbir Saini is part of the project since he is a GSoC 08 student

Just came across a post on the info-fsf mailing list about WBUR Boston adding support for Ogg Vorbis. Interestingly they recommend XMMS as a audio player along with the other more "popular" options.

Just point and click on http://www.wbur.org/listen/feed/ogg.m3u to listen to the Ogg Vorbis stream.

This was my first attempt at listening to Internet radio on a free software operating system and was quite impressed by the audio quality. (I have a 2Mbps ADSL connection from Tata.)

Even though I had experienced some weird developements myself last year, it had somehow ended on a happy note. However this one seems a bit too much to fathom.

All along I had believed that past credentials as a contributor is an ace up your sleeve when it comes to Google Summer of Code selections. Favouring someone because their only motivation to contribute is $4500, and downgrading an existing contributor because they will "anyway continue to do good work" is the kind of distorted thinking that I like to hate.

Thanks to the Fedora Project I have a paid subscription to LWN now.

Fedora stickers being printed the evening before the project day thanks to some last-ditch effort by Kushal and Arjun.

Rahul Sundaram -- Freedom is a Feature.

Mo Duffy in the speakers' lounge.

Kishore Bhargava.

That is Arjun and /me at the GNOME project day.

Piyush Verma -- the KDevelop guy.

Photos taken by Kushal Das.

Rakesh is at it again.

FOSS.in is over and I am richer by a dozen stickers (GNOME, Fedora, Red Hat), a GNOME T-shirt, a Mozilla badge, and plenty of other goodies.

Here are some pictures taken over the last one week.

Rakesh has started the GNOME Kashmiri Translation Team. He is in the process of doing the initial groundwork before starting the actual onslaught.

If you happen to know the Kashmiri language, then I am sure you can lend a hand.

A couple of months back, I had written about Rakesh's attempt at translating MoinMoin to Hindi. As of now 27% of the strings have been translated, and he plans to score a half-century by next week.

If you know Hindi, you can head over to http://master.moinmo.in/MoinI18n/hi and lend him a hand with the translation work.

Some interesting statistics regarding delegate registrations for this year's FOSS.in: http://foss.in/2007/register/delegates/stats.php.

This year we have more people coming in from outside Bangalore (the venue of the conference), while there has been a substantial increase in the number of students who have registered as delegates.

Among the various project days the Fedora Project Day is at joint second with Mozilla, while Debian/Ubuntu is the most sought after of them all.

So head over to http://foss.in/2007/register/delegates and register yourself. Remember online registrations are cheaper than spot registrations.

With not even a month to go for FOSS.in, it is time to register yourself as a delegate. This year's edition is bigger and better than ever before and the focus is entirely on encouraging and helping more and more people to contribute to various free software projects.

The Fedora Project Day has a bunch of great talks tailored for potential new-comers to the community:

Amey Inamdar - Fedora-ARM : Call for contributions

Debarshi Ray - Opyum: offline package management with Yum

Dimitris Glezos - Transifex: Upstream-friendly, community-centric translations

Mairin Duffy - How to Theme Fedora

Rahul Bhalerao - Fonts in Fedora

Rahul Sundaram - Spin your own Fedora - Custom spins, software appliances and derivative distributions

Rahul Sundaram - Fedora - Freedom is a feature

Tom Callaway - Fedora Secondary Architectures: Moving Beyond x86

Tom Callaway - Best Practices with RPM

Here is your chance to be with the renowned hackers of the world and be a part of the gang yourself.

Courtesy: Aamod Nerurkar

We are having a Fedora Project Day at this year's Foss.in. So if you are an existing Fedora community member and want to be a part of one of the most technical and exciting FOSS conferences in the world get yourself and your proposals registered before 8th October.

Over the past few days Rakesh Pandit has been translating MoinMoin into Hindi. He is absolutely new to localization and he is actually learning on the job, and is being helped by Alok Mishra.

For those of who do not know Rakesh, he is one of the successful Google Summer of Code 2007 participants and worked with the GNU Project. By some stroke of luck he also happens to be by classmate and very good friend from college.

http://freed.in/.

Last Saturday we had the second episode of the FOSS workshop at Rajabazar Science College, Kolkata. Due to Indranil Das Gupta's unavailability, I took the GNU/Linux pre-tutorial instead of the GCC/Make/GDB workshop, which was again handled by Santanu Sinha.

Before the start of the workshop we ran into some X server related problems on the machines on which the pre-tutorial was to be held. The Rajabazar Science College authorities had some brand new Pentium D machines on standby, which were used to replace most of these problematic systems.

We started with a brief history of the Free Software movement, and then went on to see how to navigate the a basic GNOME desktop. Next we explored some of the Free Software equivalents of common proprietary programs like OpenOffice.org (for MS Office), GIMP (for Adobe Photoshop), Evince (for Adobe Acrobat), GAIM (for GTalk, Yahoo! Messenger), etc..

Next was lunch, which comprised of chicken sand-witches, fish fry, ice-cream, etc..

We started the second half with basic network configuration before going on to explore package management tools and the concept of a 'distribution'. Since all the systems were running Fedora, we limited ourselves to YUM and Pirut as the package management tools. We rounded up the session with a look at the GNU Coreutils and Vi.

Apart from the wonderful teaching experience there were a couple of pluses:
* I managed to learn a bit more about Vi through Vimtutor.
* # yum update pdgin* gnome-* openoffice* ... while showing off package management tools.

Given:

* X is a lawyer.
* X is a 'champion' of 'FOSS' in India.
* X neither read the GPL nor the BSD license before profusely advertising his love for the latter and disapproval for the former.
* X loves Python, Django and Mandriva.
* X thinks Ubuntu is confusing and Debian is hard to pronounce.
* X thinks Dr. Richard M. Stallman is an old man who has lost his relevance.
* X does not approve of the term GNU/Linux and thinks the FSF is a monopoly.
* X wants code in CVS need to be stable if he is to contribute to it.

* X uses MacOSx on his Apple laptop.

Questions:

* Identify X.
* Is MacOSx a free operating system?

A summary of all the participants and their proposals in Google Summer of Code 2007. This was obtained by parsing the contents of http://code.google.com/soc using http://etherboot.org/gsoc/mksum.cpp by Marty Connor.

The Indian free/libre open source software planet.