Since i was the one who was in touch with you from college, i think need to clear some air. After we had a brief discussions in august and when Shakthi was not able to follow it up, someone else in group contacted Sangal sir directly(i think before that they tried to contact others too).

Then they got referred to people he says in post and thats what he wrote about. About organizing the conference, i was interested organizing mukt.in IIIT because i felt there is little or no interaction between the FOSS enthusiastic IIITians and the local FOSS community. There is no problem in organizing a conference on our own, but the aims should then be much different. Something only us can do in that case. May related to relevance of FOSS technologies in development,education. How community driven efforts help to get better results can be discussed there. mukt.in is more like a meet up of enthusiasts to pass on information, like an informal irc meet.

@ShArK A few can’t certainly be role models!

@Abhishek Sainani Hehe!

@ZenWalker

@Kavita Vemuri
I have mailed shakthi kannan about your comment. I hope we see a reply soon. In general, I don’t care about FOSS events and conferences but its about those students who are really enthusiastic about conducting these things!

@Shashank Sharma true in some cases

First email: dated 7/6/2009 – request to meet from a student to organize a FOSS event at the institute. We met, talked and reply (email dated 7/7/2009) from my end was “In principle I have no issue, except that one-two students take up responsibility. But November is a little far off, and the admin are not sure if any major conference is fixed for that day. Let me know the date, and the number of people expected and we can try and block 119.
”
Second email from student dated 7/8/09 – The student met the outside organizers over dinner and they decided to take it slow. Mr Shakthiman was invited to come to the campus to talk about it and wanted to conduct some workshops & sessions.

Reply from my end dated – 7/8/09 – “Another way is for us to take up some good open source projects – Prof X & I have a couple of big projects, let me know if there at least 3-4 who are interested in working on it. A good mix is 2 MS students and 3-4 UG’s, and this is an interesting project as it has to be designed and built from scratch.
I don’t mind OS meets & workshops but the better to convey our commitment & most important expertise is by actually working on projects.”
(just to add here: this project was completed by a company housed in IIITH)
The next email was from another student with the same introduction, again we met and discussed. A suggestion from my end was to have a FOSS event by IIITH and not necessarily with any outsiders. The last reply from the second student said he will get back after talking to Mr Shakthiman.

And by the way: this person Mr Shakthiman was supposed to meet me and made two commitments which he didn’t keep up. Second, the head of the institution neither mentioned the event or sent an email on it!. Third point: we had a 2 day open source event by Twincling a year ago and out of 120 students who attended there were only 2 IIITH students!.

The reply is not to justify anyone’s innocence but just to clarify the institute name. A person who professes to support open source should also understand that open source or open speech or write requires responsibility.

Yes, I am totally jobless to be replying to blogs!.

Have fun & still look forward to a open source event by IIITH.