foss.in 2006

The past 3 days of foss.in/2006 have been very interesting. As Gopal said, this conference is in the hallways. I’ve seen/had a fair share of amazing conversations from watching a passionate debate of companies “exploiting” people by getting them to work on their open source product vs how is it exploiting if it is voluntary (Aaron Seigo did the defending :)) to conversations about generator expressions in Python to Java being GPLed to how the ambitious KDE 4 reminds me of Vista (although the KDE community has proved itself time and again before), to Ubuntu Dapper vs Edgy (Edgy has been causing some problems for me). Regarding the talks themselves, lot has been written and clicked already.

The most I got out of this conference was seeing the passion again. The love of programming. The love of helping others. The feeling of being part of a community. The smile on the face of a coder when he comes to know that software he wrote is helping a poverty-stricken country modernize itself. Most of all, the first point again, the love of creating something. I had forgotten that feeling.