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
Edit: the man has a wikipedia page, for the curious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atul_Chitnis
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.
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!
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.
It was clear from seeing people interact with Atul that people really respected him.
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...
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.
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.
I still liked the guy, I knew these allegations. I read his articles while growing up, as I've mentioned above.
The author of that blog, "Kenneth Gonsalves" is dead for almost a year.