Open Source symposium

Opensource symposium was organized on 17th October 2006

This events target audience were CIOs and CTOs.

Mr. Nandu Pradhan, President and MD Red hat India Private Limited Welcomed the gathering on Both days. In his interesting welcome speech, he suggested the power of open source and how it can help in building the nation, by contributing to the areas of non profit making sectors of e-governance. And also there was a hint about how one can generate revenues while working with such environments.

Opening Keynote on the Open Source Symposium was by Dr. D B Pathak, HOD KreSIT, IIT Mumbai.
He was keen about the economical changes that open source can bring in to the economy of the countries like India. And also he raised some questions about the Intellectual property rights, for example, “If somebody owns the right for a piece of code, and if the documentation is written by somebody else, then how IP rights can be justified, who owns what and how end user sails over all these issues..?”

Then there was a panel discussion on the topic “ How Linux has added value to the business? whats more to the business beyond Linux and Open Source?” Unfortunately I was not able to attend this panel discussion as there was an emergency call in the office.

Post lunch session was divided into two streams business and technical, both streams running parallel.
The topics I attended are.

1.Enterprise Linux Best Practices – Customer case study – Maharashtra Courts.
by Mr. Ashish J Shiradhonkar National Informatics Center
2.Identity Management: LDAP in the RealWorld, Migration and Integration
by Satish Chetty, Redhat
3.Reducing the cost of Management with Stateless Linux
by Rajeshwar Singh, Redhat.
4.Dynamic Linux Kernel Instrumentation with SystemTap
by Eugene Teo Redhat Asia Pacific.

All the three topics were very interesting, The first described about how e-governance and digitization of the Maharashtra Law courts has happened, the challenges faced, and the solutions by opensource were discussed.

In the second Lecture Mr. Satish Chettty, discussed about implementation of LDAP for SSO, mail and many other application. It was a complete technical session which also talk about smooth migration and integration if different systems already exists. (as I am already planning to have some kind of SSO in our organization, this lecture gave me some more inputs).

The Stateless Linux looks to be a better solution for Call Center and BPO environments. This is not much different from the LTSP or thin client concept, except a stateless Linux Desktop will work offline also once it got booted. This will give a good control and administrative rights to the system administrator and also it is easy to deploy the new management policies if we are adopting/migrating. But as this is evolving technology, the suitability of such system to the Offshore development Center is to be evaluated and tested.

The last topic of the day was most beautiful, which described about tuning the performance of the system, editing kernel parameters, It was very informative, But really went above my head ;).

The session was ended with a Q&A, and a lucky dip where winners carried a sony PSP and iPOD.


Red Hat Developers day was organized on 18th October 2006

Mr. Nandu Pradhan, President and MD of Red Hat India delivered the welcome speech, where he repeated the quotes he made yesterday, But the session was mainly focusing on Developers

As again there was a call from the office I was not able to attend the seminars which were there in the pre-lunch session, But I attended three sessions in the post lunch session.

Mugshot – A Social live Experience by Ramakrishna Reddy, which talks about development of orkut like community, which can be used to share pics, music, and many other things.

Semantic Storage System on Desktop by Satish Mohan which talks about a new kind of file system, which index the files with respect to the content of the file, and stores in a folder, which can be addressed by different ways, and file system itself is robust.

Localization on Red Hat Enterprise Linux by Mayank Jain talks about the initiative Red Hat is taken in standardization and localization of the programs/ fonts/ OS, so that the application area of the computers can extended to the Indian Local Market.

The complete two days session was thought provoking, gave an insight into the future of computing, and was very useful for developers, system administrators and infrastructure managers.