[Debian-in-workers] Foss.in/2007: Debian's plan..

[Bdale Garbee]

On Thu, 2007-08-09 at 08:57 +0200, Christian Perrier wrote: 
> > Jaldhar/Christian, can you ask him? I think Bdale (DPL at that time)
> > came in 2004 to attend Linux Bangalore (Former name of Foss.in).

I was invited to give a "keynote" talk at Linux Bangalore on behalf of
HP, and chose as my topic the story of how we ported Debian to the hppa
and ia64 architectures. 

> Sam (nd Bdale), all this is about plans to participate to Foss.in, by
> far the largest FLOSS event in India, at the beginning of December, in
> Bangalore.

Yes, I know of the event.  Other HP employees, both local to India and
from the US, have participated in foss.in since my trip there.

> Kartik, you mentioned Bdale attending in 2004. He was not the DPL at
> that time and I'm pretty sure that such travel was funded through
> Bdale's professionnal travels (somethign neither Sam or I can do) and
> was part of Bdale's regular "HP/Linux" evangelization.

Yes, my travel was sponsored by HP.  In fact, I spent only one day at
the conference, and the rest of the week in various meetings with HP
people and HP customers in the area.

Among other things, it was my great pleasure to meet Ramakrishnan
Muthukrishnan in person at th, who is a fellow DD and ham radio operator
with whom I have shared work on the GNU Radio packaging for Debian.

> - funding by organizers (dunno if that's possible)
> - funding by Debian (not exactly the usual way-->most often, the
> participation of Debian "representatives" is better funded by external
> means and Debian funds are used in quite rare cases, afaik
> - funding by an external sponsor

We have talked about using Debian funds to sponsor travel to events like
this, but we haven't actually done it very much. 

> I would be interested to hear about your respective comments, people
> (please note that both lists may have a closed policy when non
> subscribers post, unfortunately, which would, also unfortunately, turn
> such discussion into a private one)

A Debian presence at foss.in would indeed be a good thing.  I don't know
immediately what the best solution for achieving that is. 

Bdale