Its been over 8 months since i moved to Chennai, the southern part of India. Chennai has a strong free software user as well as contributor base.
I was invited as speaker at an engineering college (jaya college of engineering). I was amazed to see the enthusiasm among student s about free software. The college has students contributing to free software allready.
I interacted with a crowd of over 200 students. Most of them were freshers and knew what free software is. I am sure with the guidance of teachers/staff/faculty the college will produce more contributors to many more projects.
Apart from regular talk there were Software stalls as well where students were showing demo of popular free software like Scribus, Inkscape, Kde/Gnome, text editors like Vi/Emacs and office suites. I was happy and surprised to see school students participating in the event.
I was extremely happy to meet the HOD of college Comp Sc, Mr. Kumaran who is leading this initiative since year 2007.
I had word with them and we are also going to organize Ubuntu “Oneiric” release party next month.
Lastly i did got a shiny memento for my presence at the event. 🙂
