R.I.P Atul Chitnis : The Man Who Changed the Open Source World | Hacker News Reader

R.I.P Atul Chitnis : The Man Who Changed the Open Source World

nextbigwhat.com

303 pointsBrajeshwar45 comments

I never expected to find out about the passing of one of my closest friends via HN.

I'm sure others will find better ways to articulate the below.

Atul was a wonderful human being. Others know him as the face of open source in India, the man who with his writing, his enthusiasm and his unlimited passion willed the FOSS community forward in India. There is a reason why almost anyone who was involved with open source in India knew his name and probably recalled him fondly.

Me, I know him, as one of my closest friend and mentor. Never missing a chance to poke fun at my Microsoft past, he was a huge source of inspiration and friendship to me and my wife.

His last tweet quotes Pink Floyd's "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" - that is exactly what he was.

Atul, we'll miss you beyond what mere words can express.

This is a sad news.

I remember Atul's articles in PC Quest since 1993. He wrote eloquently and passionately.

His most admirable trait was, fighting for what is right. Like, once he wrote a good article about why the value of a BBS is amplified by the discussions that occur over there, and not as a means for file sharing. To quote him from memory, "Imagine that you wrote a great book and made it available for free so that people can make good use of it. Now, if people took your book and used it to wrap _chanas_."

In 1995, PC Quest bundled Slackware Linux with a CD-ROM, a first for any Indian magazine. This heralded a beginning of a generation of Linux enthusiasts in India. During those years, we used to look forward to a copy of PC Quest, in part because of his articles. Otherwise, how would we have known about CompuServe, pobox.com and many other things? He was absolutely right during 90s, about the Internet services being toys.

I could perhaps go on writing an essay, but will wrap with just two examples about his writing style.

On visiting various CompuServe forums, he would say, "...and when I log in to various forums greeted with '11 messages for you', I feel like my daughter yelling at me, 'Papa!'"

On the extremely funny and weird userid scheme for dial up Internet accounts by the only ISP (Govt. owned) in India, "...and when I got an e-mail address, Gautam sent a mail to me 'Welcome _Qaidi_ no. AAQ392021!" (User names used to be like AAQ392021 in 1995.). Sidenote: we have come a very long way since then and things are much better now.

I might as well say that the only other technology writer who impressed me more than Atul during 90s, was Brian Kernighan.

Although Atul has passed away, he will surely remain alive in the hearts of a generation of technologists in India.

Goodbye great columnist, and may your soul rest in piece.

मृत्योर्मामृतं गमय् ।

Atul ('toolz' on IRC) has been an influence over the tech crowd in India for years - a lot of people (techies / hackers) were introduced to Linux, and Open Source in general by his enthusiastic stage-speaks or writings on web / magazines.

The events Linux/Bangalore and later FOSS.IN used to be the hacker gatherings, and the conversations were fantastic in these events. Atul celebrated hackers, and I recall him calling out Gopal V ('t3rminat0r' - twitter/IRC) on stage who had ported dotGNU Portable .NET to Encore Simputer during LB/2004.

Atul also propelled the concept of small-distributed Linux enthusiast meetings (BoFs) across Bangalore city (this was in 2004/2005), which essentially meant that techies found niche groups to meet up and interact (mostly over tea/coffee, less on beers), instead of waiting for big conferences to happen. He ran a BBS earlier in the 90s, and knew how to get people to interact IRL when BBSes went dead in 2000s.

Atul has been a person who celebrated Technology, and influenced a lot of other people to see the view. Rest in Peace, toolz.

I walked up to him back-stage and said "Now, you owe me a coffee".

He still owes me that coffee :)

R.I.P toolz.

Does anybody know what changes Atul Chitnis has caused in the open source world?

Edit: the man has a wikipedia page, for the curious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atul_Chitnis

I remember his columns in PCQuest in the early nineties quite fondly. Before internet access was widely available in India, logging into CiX - a BBS he ran - over a 2400 bps modem and a noisy (and expensive) interstate connection was an exhilarating experience.

For a large number of Indians who are using Linux today, that first encounter was through PCQuest magazine - which bundled every flavor of linux it could find in a DVD (along with a bunch of free software) and gave it away with the magazine.

A lot of people I know started using OpenOffice after they first encountered it on PCQuest.

He also founded and ran some of the biggest FOSS groups in India.

RIP.

Actually it was a CD not a DVD, at least for a few years!

Yes, it was a Slackware CD that came with every copy of the PCQuest mag back in the 1995-1996 time frame. My first taste of Linux and more importantly, it satiated a thirst for hacking and knowledge. I still look back and recall fondly all the neat things I learned hacking Slackware. R.I.P. Atul.

Couldn't agree more.

While in 1st year, I would, each month go to the market and buy last month's tech magazines mainly for software and those Linux distros. Now I am on X but I still have fond memories with playing and struggling with all those Linux distros.

When I recently saw his name in one of the news-letters somewhere I immediately checked whether he's the same guy I used to read in those magazines and I was glad to know he was.

RIP!

He chaired the committee that ran and organized foss.in - (un)arguably India's greatest open source event.

Held every December, it attracted thousands of students and working professionals from across the country. It helped set the image of Linux and the wider OSS community fairly high in the country.

I remember going to my first foss.in in 2008. It was brilliant and I felt exhilarated that I could meet with people like minded as myself - who had all come to know about OSS via other efforts. It was India's first gathering of like minded "hackers"[1].

I've met some really great people through foss.in - they've all inspired me with their work on Mozilla, PHP, KDE, etc.. I think pre-GSOC, foss.in was the most significant if not the only torch-bearer of open source in India.

I was very upset when they shut it down after 10+ years in 2011 - the team had apparently felt that their job of infusing Linux in the student population was sort of accomplished.

He was a pretty great guy!

[1]"hackers": the way ESR would call 'em if he could. Selfless, extremely smart, lets-get-things-done people, with tens of contributions to the open source world.

I traveled to India to speak at foss.in years ago. It was a great experience. And I got to visit his house for a party with many of the people that helped make the conference happen--all fond memories.

It was clear from seeing people interact with Atul that people really respected him.

@jacquesm, may I present the other side of the man? Readers can judge for themselves what upheavals he has caused:

1. He took over the Linux-Bangalore group and renamed it to foss.in in 2005. There was also another mailing list but those have been taken down now. http://kingsly.net/kingsly/Linux/bangalore/no-blug

http://kingsly.net/kingsly/Linux/bangalore/no-blug2/

http://kingsly.net/kingsly/Linux/bangalore/no-blug3/

2. Loved to squat on opensource domains and take-over the project: http://lawgon.livejournal.com/45791.html

3. He never hesitated to complain to the bosses of those who disagreed with him: http://lawgon.livejournal.com/45791.html?thread=166367#t1663...

http://lawgon.livejournal.com/4841.html

http://lawgon.livejournal.com/7842.html

Wow, an anonymous comment ripping someone who has just passed away with a bunch of slanderous accusations. You're a brave one.

I won't be doing any judging of the subject of this thread based on your links but I'll judge you by your actions if you don't mind. If you do something like this try being a man about it and put your name to it.

On another note, props for establishing a new low benchmark for anonymous cowardice.

You wouldn't be the author of that blog by any chance?

I don't take kindly to "There is a strange relationship between bleeding heart westerners and some breeds of Indians" or "The westerners, burdened with guilt, tend to take any report from India at face value, and the Indians tend to only respect what is endorsed by the westerners".

I don't see any evidence from your links that he spoke to anyone's managers.

Frankly, I wonder what axe you have to grind and what side of the story hasn't been told by you.

Atul's response is much classier and gives a lot more background info: http://lawgon.livejournal.com/45791.html?thread=165855#t1658...

Agreed. But the accusations are not unfounded and he practically skirted the accusation and simply put a lot of jargon and misleading references and connections which Kenneth countered again in his "non-classy" style with no capitalization. Let's call a spade a spade when needed.

I still liked the guy, I knew these allegations. I read his articles while growing up, as I've mentioned above.

> You wouldn't be the author of that blog by any chance?

The author of that blog, "Kenneth Gonsalves" is dead for almost a year.

I'm sorry to hear that. That just makes the above poster even worse, in my opinion.

His biggest contribution was that he ran foss.in

Bombay, 1999 - my first ever Internet connection was a VSNL shell account that could barely load Yahoo.com on Windows 98.

PCQuest, the (paper) magazine which Atul edited, bundled a CD with a new distro of Linux (or KDE or GNOME) with each month's magazine and became my introduction to the world of Linux, and soon there after to programming for fun.

Sad to learn that he is no more.

PCQuest ensured that even though general net connectivity and speed in India lagged behind for a while (due to government restrictions and then for a long time because the state-monopoly ISP, VSNL, priced their substandard service exhorbitantly), the Linux revolution reached India almost as it happened. Without those monthly CDs Linux would have been impossible for many of us to download with slow modems and a Lynx browser. The first ever CD they included contained OS/2 warp, though - this was '94-ish.

I feel like a kid when I hear these stories. As an Indian, and not having any exposure(nor the means to afford to get some exposure) to computers.

My first date with a computer was in school around 1999. Our school principal had bought a Desktop which could only run DOS. No one in the school knew what a computer even was. A kid ran back to his home to bring the game 'Lion King' from his home on a Floppy disk. He successfully booted the PC and ran the game on it. It was the most fascinating moment of my whole life to stand in a room full of 200 kids to watch the black magic happen.

I have very interesting stories coming back from those days. I've done some ingenious and some super stupid things out of curiosity.

A decade earlier but it was almost the same situation for us. The school computers we PC/XT and they were teaching us Logo and GW-BASIC. When someone's home 286 PC could run Prince of Persia it was a jaw dropping experience. And the QuickBasic IDE seemed heavensent. Oh how I miss my pirated copy of Turbo C :-)

Atul was one of my biggest gateways into Linux and FOSS in general. I'd venture that he was face of FOSS evangelism in India. Most of what he wrote was firmly opinionated and highly informative. He was also a massively interesting person to talk to, and I came away quite frankly awestruck by the man when our paths crossed occasionally during FOSS.IN 2009.

I am devastated by this news. RIP.

This comes as a shock for me, he was young. I had no idea Atul had been battling cancer for an year.

Here are the ways Atul touched my life:

  In the days before the Internet was accessible in India, he ran a dial up BBS, and it was a small group of users who were members of all BBSes. It was interesting to read up opinions of informed people. Topics ranged from computing to women's rights.

  He would write interesting articles for PCQuest, a valuable resource before the internet made print magazines obsolete

  He ran a Linux user group

  A few years ago I rediscovered him on the internet. He was passionately exposing the scam MBA provider, Arindam Chaudhuri. This is commendable on its own, as a lot of ill informed people to this day pay large sums of money to Arindam to get a business degree worth nothing.

His tweet from yesterday - https://twitter.com/AtulChitnis/status/341002009794715648

I was fortunate enough to attend a talk of his organized by the LUG at my alma mater. He was a passionate and engaging speaker with an amazing presentation style. That one talk did more to spread FOSS popularity at my college than a lot of our past efforts combined. All said and done I left enlightened.

Much before I knew him from his FOSS work, I used to follow his column on a computer magazine called Computers@Home. Sad to learn he is no more.

I hold Atul and Kiran Jonnalagada as the key reasons why I eventually gave up on my Accountancy degree and took the plunge into learning about programming & technology. Reading their articles in PCQuest and CHIP about the "magic" of technology, about the joys (and challenges) of working with FOSS/Linux and other such topics was something so alien to the grinding frustration of being a Chartered Accountant that eventually I just had to find out for myself whether it was all true. I'm now completing a decade working in Technology and I honestly cannot see myself doing anything else. I was lucky enough to meet Kiran a few years back and thank him (maybe not strongly enough) for helping me find my calling. I had hoped to eventually meet Atul and thank him as well - that I will never get the chance to so I will regret for the rest of my life. R.I.P Atul - "I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done. It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known." ('A Tale of Two Cities')

I first traveled to India on business in the mid-90s. I had organized a Linux user group in my city and thought it might be fun to meet like-minded individuals in Bangalore on my first trip there. I reached out and contacted a local organizer who would turn out to be Atul Chitnis. He was a gracious and gregarious host. He organized a gathering during my visit; we met at his business (Exocore) and the traveled to a local pub where I spent the rest of the evening talking with him and many others about the impact of open source on their lives, their livelihood, and the world. We only left when they finally kicked us out of the pub after closing time. It is one of my favorite moments of that first trip.

Afterwords we remained periodically in touch, though I never saw him face-to-face again. I would usually write after hearing of his involvement in some new conference or having seen mention of him in some publication.

I am sorry to hear of his passing. He will be missed.

Here is another obituary to the legendary hero by the co-founder of HasGeek and one who knew Atul Chitnis for a very long time http://www.nextbigwhat.com/atul-chitnis-obituary-297/

RIP Atul, you will be remembered for ever. Thanks for everything.

This was unexpected. I met Atul at FOSS 2012 in Bangalore. That was fun event. Atul seemed drained at the time; I didn't know it was cancer doing it. He will be missed.

I'm not sure if it's just me, but the first sentence;

> NextBigWhat records with sadness the demise of Atul Chitnis, a passionate technologist who spent much of his lifetime popularizing free and open source software.

To me sounds awful. Demise always sounds like what you expect some evil genius to say in a film or something.

Anyway, RIP Atul. The Open Source community owes you a great deal.

RIP Atul. I was hoping your spirit & enthusiasm will help you win the battle over cancer.

Thanks for your pioneering efforts to promote open source in India.

You were far too young to suffer such a tragic death. My thoughts are with your family & loved ones.

http://atulchitnis.net/2013/meet-my-new-companion/#more-3909

He was so optimistic well into his treatment! You have shown great courage, sir.

http://atulchitnis.net/2013/jyoti-and-kishore/ says he used to smoke like a chimney :(. Maybe that was his downfall.

He liked all technologies but he had special love for open source. he organized FOSS.IN which is best conference on open source in India when Bangalore is starved of open source events with his faithful friends

Obligatory "fuck cancer" post goes here.

I'm sure this is just some manner of selection or confirmation bias, but it seems cancer takes more technology luminaries than pretty much anything else.

My heartfelt condolences to the Atul's family, friends and the team at PCQ.

Atul Chitnis, thank you for your writing and introducing me and many others in India to FOSS.

Peace and Goodwill.

RIP Atul Chitnis. Met him during a conference in Mauritius around 2002 and we had a great conversation about open source software in poor(er) countries.

RIP Atul. Like many others, PCQuest with the bundled CD's was a special joy every month.

I learned much from PCQuest during its early years. Thank you Atul Chitnis.

RIP Atul Chitnis. And thanks for all the foss!

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