[ILUG-BOM] Linux Lunacy at Arnala

[Abhijeet More]

"Are you sure about the place and the timing?", I asked Sachin - the
only presence from the LUG that I was aware of till then. " As far as I
remember it *was* Borivili Station, 7:00 am , Platform no. 6 .... under
the indicator."
"Yeah! Platform no 6 , under the indicator", comes a voice from behind
us. "Hi, I am Mr. Ram Rao ...."
Trevor joins in a while later, and then the gang eventually assembles.
We left at around 8:00am from Borivili Station for Arnala. But 'lunacy'
had already begun for all there. No one seemed to notice that things had
been delayed because people were already talking computers ... after the
initial 'Hi's and 'Hello's.
We got to the resort talking about open source as a business strategy,
AMD vs. Intel, 'tangibility in the new world' and what not. At the
resort, we hogged at the breakfast table. Absence of females at the
resort made us wonder if entry was restricted only to Linux users ;-).
Some soft music was being played and the pool looked inviting ... so we
obliged our senses ...
Ouch, the water was chilling and neither was the sun as hot as yet
... but soon we got playing handball in the pool and the chill didn't
quite bother us anymore. Gurpreet, Kunal , Warren had arrived by then.
After a few beers, people got back in the pool for some more
handball. By noon we'd had enough of it, so we got out and began waiting
for lunch to be served.
A discussion on the history of commercial computers ensued with Mr. Rao
talking about how computers long back,before the IBM PC would boot into
BASIC. There was discussion on the invention of GUI and its commercial
adoption first by Apple and then by Microsoft. This was followed by some
discussion on the current hardware scenario, cheap laptops, expensive
server tecnologies. Trevor talked about Media Labs and some of the
research work going on there... on low cost technologies.
Lunch was taken at half past one and by that time all of us were hungry
enough not to talk about computers until some pet puja.
Prakash Advani of freeos.com, then talked about the inside experience at
his venture, what gave him the idea, how he got funded and his thoughts
on content publishing dotcoms as of now.
That was followed by discussion on free software business models. Almost
everybody was of the opinion that intellectual property had to be
recognised. Ideas for revenue generation under such models were put
in. Mr. Rao discussed in particular about his enterprise Bajirao
Technologies which is into (proprietary) Linux based solutions for medical
institutions of all sizes. 
We left for a walk by the beach at around 3:30, after which we left for
Virar. However lunacy wasn't quite over. In the train on the way back,
there was that never ending war: 'emacs vs. vi'
I and Warren Noronha happened to be the only emacs users around. So it
was 2 against 12, but still vociferous enough, countering each of
the stupid anti-emacs arguments ... after all, emacs *is* the best editor ;-).
So that's what Linux Lunacy was like. Looking forward for a lot more
such events.
ciao
Abhijeet More

PS: This lug seriously needs to take a look at HOWTO encourage women in
Linux.(http://www.linuxchix.org) ... How about a Linux workshop at
SNDT?? (Kapil's idea ... I think)