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Some work at office held me back till 1400 Hrs today. Handed over the distribution CD of Hindawi to Abhishek Choudhary as he forgot to bring it along. There is no Internet Connection available at the conference so I had to download it at office. It would be great contribution if Hidawi could be ported on GNU Linux.

Met Karunakar G. of IndLinux at his stall. In foss.in IndLinux aroused considerable interest so this time I was determined to take a look at the work they had done. Many applications have been translated in Hindi and other languages. Many more still to be translated. This is a good indication that localization projects are maturing slowly. A lot of people have already came forward for mentor-ship of these localization projects. Sarai (sarai.net) is one of it working in Delhi-NCR region.

In the evening there was a meet arranged by ILUG-Delhi with Klaus Knopper of Knoppix and Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu. I reached there at least 15 minutes late as there was no one at the FSF-I stall and we had a few visitors.

The discussion with Klaus Knopper included the OSS movement in Germany and EU, different laws in Germany and the software patents. How OSS community is fighting against software patents in EU and Germany. The discussion also drifted on the efforts to make computer usable for disabled people. In the discussion a surprising fact Klaus told is that there is a syndicate of publishers who force writers to sale all their rights to them and won’t let you sell it to anyone out of Germany. Meaning they won’t let writers have share on royalty. He called them ’sort of publication mafia’. He also discussed the future of Knoppics and shared his views.

In the meeting with Mark Shuttleworth, he gave a small presentation on Ubuntu Linux as a part of his Asia Business Tour. He mentioned the goals of Ubuntu are to make it easy to use for desktop users and general computer users, build good user base of Ubuntu by providing full commercial support, translations and device drivers. Ubuntu is already providing certification programs for techies. Ubuntu is acquiring or have already acquired certifications from companies like IBM, Oracle that Ubuntu is ready for their product, told Mark.

This meet made day 2 memorable.