• Friday, February 10 – Mozilla participation at GNUnify ’12
• Saturday, February 11 – Mozilla participation at GNUnify ’12
• Sunday, February 12 – Mozilla India community meetup in Pune

The goal of this meetup on Feb. 12 is to gather the India community together for a number of objectives including:

• establish the community structure
• build road map for 2012
• identify priorities for the community
• bring together key localizers and other core and active contributors (including ReMo)
• promote Mozilla in India

Arky and Axel from the l10n Drivers will be attending. I will be attending. We also hope to get a member from Developer Engagement to attend. More info to come when we have it.

Anyone who is active in the Mozilla India community is welcome to join this event. As Mozilla will not be providing any funding to attendees, we selected Pune as this location is home to the Red Hat team which has a number of key localization team leaders and members.

We will do our best to accommodate online participation via IRC but this will depend on local connectivity at the venue which is not yet determined. Information about the weekend will be posted here:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Indiameetup2012

Vineel is helping to organize the weekend but we would love help from Mozilla community members in Pune for local support and knowledge. If you can help Vineel with planning, please contact him directly or post to the Community-India mailing list or Google Group interface.

The planning for the event will be discussed on the Community-India list (see above) so please join the list to participate.

See you in Pune!

Will India Become the New Vanguard of the Open Source Movement?
My main issue with the piece is that while it has a lot of interesting quotes from people who are working on OSS in India, there is clearly a lack of reliable information on what is going on. I’m sure that some of that is due to the distributed nature of OSS.

 Nobody seems to have any estimates of the number of people involved in open source work. Estimates of the members of the community in India vary from 2,000 to 200,000.
…
“India needs to contribute more aggressively to the process of open source development,” says Jain. “We have an opportunity to establish leadership in this space.” Hariharan adds, “India has a lot of creativity, and it is just a matter of time before that is reflected through open source software.” In other words, the future of open source in India is still an open question.

The other part that was interesting to me was the stance of India’s former President, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

Another believer is A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, India’s former President. At a speech at the International Institute of Information Technology in Pune, he spoke about an encounter he had with Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. While Kalam was advocating open source as the best solution for a developing country like India, Gates was unmoved in his belief in the superiority of proprietary software developed by a commercial company, such as Microsoft’s Windows operating system and desktop software. “Our discussions became difficult, since our views were different,” said Kalam. Which view now prevails? “The unfortunate thing is that India still seems to believe in proprietary solutions,” Kalam added.

Indian Former President Kalam’s position is in stark contrast to China’s President Hu Jintao, who met with Bill Gates in 2006.

“Because you, Mr. Bill Gates, are a friend of China, I’m a friend of Microsoft,” Hu said, according to an Associated Press pool report from their meeting. “Also, I am dealing with the operating system produced by Microsoft every day,” he added, to laughter from those around him.