CNBC Panel Discussion on Open Source, Free & Proprietary Software

Last week, Jon "maddog" Hall, Executive Director of Linux International; Atul Chitnis, Senior Vice President at Geodesic Information Systems and I were on a CNBC panel discussion on "Open Source, Free & Proprietary Softwares" at IIT Bombay's Techfest. I am used to 30-45 minute talks on open source where I happily ramble on with my pet theories on why open source is changing the world. I have also been on panel discussions where the panelists normally gets to make an opening statement before the moderators and the audience start shooting questions. However, TV is very, very different as I discovered last week.

To start with, the CNBC panel was shot in three segments of seven minutes each (a 30 minute show has around 9 minutes of ads telecast during breaks in the show) which meant that all three panelists could speak about 3-4 sentences in each of the seven minute segments. Oh well, hopefully, it will do some good to the world of open source. The audience seemed to be mostly teenagers, which I think is a good thing. If teenagers think something is sexy, it probably is :-)

I was trying to figure out what time the panel will be on TV and the politest thing I can say is that the CNBC TV Schedules suck. Later, I got to catch up with Jon Hall and treat him to coffee at the IIT restaurant. Despite the ferocious nickname, he is a gentle giant of a man and I felt honored to be on the same panel as Jon.

I am still clueless as to when the program will be telecast. If anybody knows, drop me a line :-)

FOSS.in makes the right call

Those of you who follow FOSS.in would have noticed that this year, the conference has done a reboot on its call for papers. The web page now says,

This note is going to catch many people by surprise:

As we had explained, over and over: this is a FOSS developer and contributor conference. We are no longer a FOSS user conference.

As was mentioned last year - in the end FOSS is about Free and Open Source Software, and somebody needs to write that software.

FOSS.IN is about demolishing the contention that India is a land of FOSS consumers, with almost no contributors - that we only take, not give back.

I think it is about time that we stopped being a nation of downloaders and started "uploading." TCS releasing WANem as open source is among the great contributions coming out of India, but we need more contributions going upstream given that we produce almost 20 percent of the software developers in the world. Unless and until we start contributing, we cannot have a say in the development of technology.

A couple of years ago, when I saw in Sri Lanka, Sanjiva Weerawarna told me that the island nation has 25 committers to Apache! If Sri Lanka can contribute so much to open source, so can we. Kudos to Atul Chitnis and the FOSS.in team for taking a bold call. I like it because it reminds me so much of one of my favorite sayings, "Hands that help are holier than lips that pray."

While we are on FOSS.in, as a former journalist, I also admire the well written content on the FOSS.in web site.