Finally Jaipur got freedom from shackles of proprietary & restrictive demons.Fosjam.in was organized in city on 16-17 May 2009 jointly by Linux user group – Jaipur and JECRC research foundation. It is an event for promotion Free/Open Source Software. it was held at Jaipur Engineering College and Research Centre, Jaipur. I also attended the event by chance.
I believe it was the first time, such kind of event was happening in Jaipur. there was mad rush for the event & people even came from outside Jaipur as well. online registrations were above 300, which was many times than expected.
About the Event
The whole event was organized in just 10days by enthusiastic member of lug-Jaipur and supportive students of JECRC. speakers were free software developers from various parts of India. the talks were ranging basic topics like “how to communicate on internet effectively” and to some advanced topics like Embedded systems. Besides the main talk there here hands-on sessions called hackfests.
Day 1
Reached the Venue at 6:00PM, had no problems finding the venue thanks to easy instructions posted on their website. Event was start by a singing Free Software Song and blowing balloons called “Winblows” . Boy! what were they thinking?
After this, we were told to proceed to Labs for the talk by speakers.I had trouble finding correct lab since they are too many and without guidance it was hell lot of confusing. somehow I ended up in LAB-three. there the topic was “i-want-2-do-project-tell-me-wat-2-do-fedora” by speaker called Shakthi Kannan. the lab was well equipped with projector,AC and most important all machines were running fedora! Sessions started with all of us introducing ourselves. the talk was quite long but not boring. after session was over, there were hackfest scheduled from 10pm to 2:00AM. unfortunately, i couldn’t stay for that long.
Day 1 was awesome, event was well organized and everything was preplanned. since i had such a good experience – I decided to return for day 2.
Day 2
In Morning, I reached On time. to my surprise the event got delayed by 1hr. so i waited,waited and waited. finally we were called at about 10:40AM for talk by Lalith Suresh. If i remember correctly, he is not speaker’s panel, which was little. he told us about Open Source and its Ideology,how projects work, how can we contribute etc.the talk filled with helpful information and how can one contribute. a welcome surprise! I liked his style and Deadly PJs.The two girlfriend theory = high availability was pwnage!!
One thing I noticed and liked on day1 as well on day2 that the umber geek T-Shirts guys were wearing. i liked one on which “127.0.01” was written. Simple and Geeky!
Next was Session by Shakthi Kannan titled – Badam Halwa of Embedded Systems.
the presentation was interesting and well researched. i really appreciate all the effort he’s putting into it! Infact his talk was so good, that i decided to attend next talk as well. during next talk, we had a announcement that some talk are rescheduled.
Sad news, one talk on Linux security which was looking to attend was dropped. due to changes, i had plenty of time to socialize. I even made a few friends there. After that we had a hand-on session on IRC and a talk on Distributed & fail-safe computing.
Conclusion
A event on Technology, that too on Free and Open Source is Dream Come true for me. Ask Why?
Because I always saw such kinds of event happening other bigger cities like mumbai,pune and used to think when can we have something like this in jaipur. I want to thank all who made it possible and Jai pandya for letting me in 
Hopefully, next year it would bigger and better. maybe a national level event – possible. who knows.
As a custom, here are some pics from the event:
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Fedora Fedora !!
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banner for event
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Lush green lawns of Jerc campus
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Lalith Suresh explaining us about Open-source.
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students hungry for knowledge
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Shakthi Kannan during his embedded system talk
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A Group shot just after the IRC session. notice me still hooked on the terminal!
