FOSSSL Conference

The FOSSSL Conference was a major event of the National FOSS Week. It was Sanjiva's idea to get two key persons for each letter of LAMP. We wanted to consider the broader meaning of each word, so L stood for the whole GNU/Linux platform, M for the database component, not just MySQL, etc. Martin Michlmayr, former DPL, and Micheal Tiemann, creator of G++ represented `L', the OS component. `A' was represented by Greg Stein, president of ASF, and Sanjiva, who is also a member of the ASF and OSI boards, and leading the Apache WS project. Database component was obviously MySQL and PostgreSQL. Bruce Momjian of PostgreSQL and David Axmark, co-founder of MySQL represented the letter `M'. As letter `P' has many sub-components, not just Perl, PHP and Python, but also upcoming Ruby on Rails. Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP, and Sam Ruby, contributor to numerous projects including Perl 6, together represented `P' it at FOSSSL 2005. Danese Cooper also was a speaker at the CxO conference and was present for the panel discussion at the end of the conference. The main conference was held on the 8th and 9th. Each day, there were four 1 hour keynotes, each followed by another 30 minute speech. I had a slot on the first day to talk about Taprobane GNU/Linux, just after Martin's Debian keynote. Bud, Pradeeper and Chamindra also spoke. There was a dinner for the speakers on Thursday at `Akasa Kade', on the top (11th) floor of the same building where `Raja Bojun' is. The view of the sea from the top was fantastic. The sea side of that floor was kind of calm and quiet, and watching the great waves, looking small but numerous from afar, to meet the shore was a soothing site under the dim moon. At the dinner, Michael Tiemann explained, in reply to my question if he did any coding lately, about his pet project to calculate the lences he need to carry around by analyzing his past photographic records, and another to visualize some of his reports at RedHat. In addition to the main conference there were 4 hour tutorials by keynote speakers to cover technical stuff in detail. Two of them were on the 7th, and the others on Saturday the 10th.