In this season of GSoC related blog entries, I could not resist doing one myself. I signed up as a mentor again – 3rd time. I just love those T-Shirts. And in a pattern known for long to mentor organization administrators, as the last day for submission draws near – the project seems to be filling up with applications / proposals exponentially. Why oh why cannot applicants submit throughout the time window rather than waiting for the last days ?

In the happy news section I read that at least 2 of the GSoC candidates from last year (limited to the subset of the candidates I know) have turned mentors this year. Super nice.

In the this-should-have-happened-last-year news section, a fine gentleman has decided to put his hat into the ring as a mentor as well. Ideally, he should have done that last year but then he insisted that he was not ready. Eugene has blogged about his ideas here and is also looking out for applicants. So, if you are an applicant and want to work on this nifty instrumentation tool called Systemtap, you should know whom to get in touch with.

Umm…doesn’t anyone feel that ImportFiltersFromThunderbird is a good thing to do for Evolution ? Or, BackupThunderbirdProfile a good thing to do for Thunderbird ? The latter would save me the trouble of scripting it when moving machines and the former would get me to try out Evolution someday soon 🙂

– the sunlight was nice enough to come out well on a piddly mobile phone camera.

BIS voted against OOXML today. A big round of applause, congratulations to all those who worked long, worked hard and worked against tremendous odds to make it happen. When good people come together, good things happen.

Update: News on the voting. Microsoft said “While we are disappointed with the decision of the BIS LITD 15 committee, we are very encouraged by the support of IT industry players like NASSCOM, TCS, Wipro and Infosys who voted in favor of Open XML becoming an ISO standard”

• Hmm… one’s respect for the work done by Leslie and her team increases exponentially with the number of inane RTFM mails hit the GSoC lists. And this is after the subscription to the list sends out the FAQ as obligatory reading material.
• Monday gossip – heard an anecdote about a Product Management chap who quipped last week “I need a [Linux] product that will not require to be updated in 5 years.” Oh come on now …
• Read Night by Elie Wiesel over the weekend. The effect has been like sandpaper on the soul.

It’s Thursday today and here’s what I see:

Scary !!

The dedicated group of folks (some of whom I had the good fortune of meeting at foss.in/2007) are arranging for “FOSS 2008” at Manipur University, Canchipur on 29th and 30th March 2008. This is a build-up from the IT Talent Search which they had organized to resounding success last year. This time they are aiming to create more desktop users, developers and in general contributors to FOSS.
The group would be well served by some assistance, primarily financial. They are not registered (last I checked) with the appropriate authorities so the tax benefits etc bits won’t apply.

If you want to be part of this do write in to: ringo_pebam (at) yahoo (dawt) com or sonnyboygit (at) gmail (dawt) com.
Ringo Pebam, the never-say-die leader of the troop writes:

Till the month of Jan / February there was no plan for having another IT-Talent Search like the last year we did. It was a shocking moment for us.

It is a long journey. But, we are very sure that you are also with us. Please help if you can. 

• Noticed a thread about “Rethinking Supported Language” on the gnome-i18n mailing list. There are relevant links in the mail itself which point to a larger round of discussions happening. I think that there are two things to consider here:

• “Supported Language” status is a tag that gets a language a mention in the Release Notes. A lot of communities put in a bit of sprint to ensure that the language ends up being “supported”. It is as much a badge of pride as it is a result of team work, communication and the very best of localization. The distributions which pull in GNOME as their primary, secondary or even tertiary desktop don’t really care much about whether the language is “supported” or not and build, qa and release it all the same.
• Having said that, it might (note the “might” here) be a good idea to re-look into whether “Supported Language” should be more emphatic at GNOME as a desktop and not GNOME as a platform. The good side of this could be that languages with smaller teams can work a bit more actively towards being a “Supported Desktop Language” rather than a “Supported Language” on the platform. The implied downside is that once some language is a “Supported Desktop Language” the l10n support for the platform specific bits may not be happening. I tend to argue that any l10n team which wants to provide a complete and richer experience for GNOME in their language will eventually end up attempting platform and documentation as well.

In effect, perhaps a round of discussion on what is essential for the “Desktop” and what could be tagged as “Platform” may turn out to be a good way of doing things.

• The report is out and is available. It has some lovely words and I particularly liked “I hereby thank all the people that hacked, translated, documented, decorated, and marketed all of this, making it a reality. You have given us freedom, good jobs, and a priceless group of friends.” The somewhat never talked about gain of participating in a FOSS project is the group of friends that one finds around oneself. They are what make the process of contribution fun.
• Having had a taste of Avial (the Malayalam alternative rock group) at freed.in I obtained their album from MusicYogi.com. The album is much better than what I expected. A nice word here for MusicYogi folks as well – they send the CDs over well packaged and within time. I expect to get this as well. Yay !!
• Dropped a pretty package on The Collector’s Edition and thus expect to be making time to watch it sometime.
• Some friends have started off a project called Touchstone which hold promise of greater things to come.
• Favorite picture of the week: and the obligatory picture of the new toy: 

Red Hat in India have put in place an award program called “The World is Open“. The award and the award process are driven by Skoch Consultancy Services Pvt Ltd. – an independent think tank and a strategy and management consultancy firm. All projects based on Open Source technologies as well as projects incorporating Open Source components are eligible for nomination. These projects may be implemented by the state governments, central government, private companies,institutions or civil society. The projects should be in the areas of governance,financial sector, telecom and education.

An awards committee comprising of senior professionals from academia, government, industry and other stakeholders in the ICT-supported development of the country. Initial screening of the project nominations would be carried out on the basis of information sought in the prescribed format. Additional information, if required, would be sought and may be supplemented with Skoch’s own research or the knowledge base of the awards committee. The awards committee will deliberate and finalize the awardees. The awards committee may also nominate projects that it feels should be in the consideration set.

The awards are proposed to be conferred in a special ceremony on the 18th March 2008 at India Habitat Centre, New Delhi.