On 1/26/07, Theodore Tso <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I did give you a response. Find a way to pay for 80+ kernel summit invitees to travel to India (preferably in business class :-), and we'll talk. That's not realistic? Well, then perhaps having the concept of holding Kernel Summit in India is not realistic.
I did reply to you for your response on Jan 24th. I did ask in that - when is the deadline date to decide about the location?
As Dirk has pointed out, the Kernel Summit is a little unusual compared to events such as FOSDEM or FISL, where there are 4000-5000 attendees, and the emphasis is on the power of a large number of people in the OSS community. The Kernel Summit is a very different event, in that it is by-invitation with less than 100 people. The whole point is to get the top contributors together to be able to talk amongst themselves in a high bandwidth environment. You can't do that amongst a crowd of 800, never mind 2000 or 4000.
I do understand this & the objectives of the KS. I did mean whether is it possible FOSS.in could be used or not after KS (you've said Kernel developers would stick for 2-3 days in the location. Once the KS is over, developers can take the stage of FOSS.in to interact with people or hold a talk or whatever. I didn't put this point clearly, my mistake.
So the only reason why any organization would be willing to pay so that top contributors would come to some country like India would be if to attract visibility and excitement to some big conference or other big OSS/Linux initiative that happened right after the kernel summit. But quite frankly, I personally wouldn't consider it a wise use of money; it would cost a heck of a lot of money and there are plenty of other, more cost effective ways to promote a big OSS conference in India.
I didn't understand your statement - some country like India! MIT has Media Labs Asia in India. MIT selected India for the $100 Linux Laptop project. Airbus & Boeing are in India. You are my fellow employee & senior to me, IBM has India Research Labs! Many corporates do promote conferences here, sometimes cost need not to be a deciding factor at all when quality comes first! Anway, am yet to get a positive signal from my Bosses.
And if there's no business case for the Indian government or some local Indian companies to pay to fly all of the KS attendees to India, why in the world do you think that companies like HP, Intel, IBM, Red Hat, Novell, etc. will pay for their employees to travel to the Kernel Summit? They don't have even less of the incentive than the local Indian companies/government to do so! Maybe during the dot-com madness of the late 1990's, when people spent money like crazy on things that made no business sense whatsoever, but those days are long gone. Money doesn't grow on trees any more, if it ever did.
Regarding getting funding from Indian Govt, have decided to write personally to President of India, Dr. Kalam & to Minister for Information Technology (this is as individual capacity). I hope something happens on this...will try my best (this is a time consuming process). I do know about why corporates fund the employees (I didn't say anything -ve about this).
The main reason why we are trying a one-year experiment in Cambridge is because approximately 1/3rd of the KS attendees are from Europe. At the moment I believe we have exactly one person from India, who has been selected through her own merit, to attend the Kernel Summit. So does it make sense to fly everyone else to India? It doesn't seem so to me!
I have never mentioned any objections for other locations, plus I do understand the Geographical factors. Yep, I do know her, she is my fellow employee and a senior like you ;-)
So the real answer to how do get the Kernel Summit to happen in India? Bring a very large number of developers together in India. Get them to work really hard, encourage them to participate on LKML, and produce lots of useful patches. Eventually, some of them will do enough good work that they will be recognized as maintainers of key subsystems. When there are 25-30+ people from India who have done enough for the Linux kernel community and risen to be recognized as top contributors in the Linux world such that they are invited to the Kernel Summit on their own merits, I'm sure there a Kernel Summit in India would very quickly follow.
This is quite interesting to me. I wanted to understand here, is contributing on LKML (patches) is the ONLY criteria for holding a Kernel Summit? There might be 25-30 people from India on LKML, but they are scattered around the globe ;-). Anyway, to see 30 good & right people based in India contributing on LKML might take another 2-3 years more :( But, I will start this with me...
Still, if someone wants to pay a vast quantity of money to pay travel for all so that the KS can be held in some exotic location (especially if it's Waikiki beach, or Aspen Colorado during the skiing season), I'm sure people will be willing to listen. But realistically, it just doesn't make sense, so it's not likely someone would make us such an offer. (Unless perhaps in some conspiracy theory scenario where Microsoft pays $$$ to some VC company to sponsor an event in Moskow, and then contracts out to the KGB to fill the meeting room with an aerosolized powder of Polonium 210 to kill off all of the top Linux developers in one fell swoop. But that sort of thing only happens in spy novels. :-)
I don't think even in a spy novel FSB (ex-KGB) can become a hand in a glove for Microsoft ;-)
- Ted
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