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Long time no see :(

Its been about six months since I have been distanced form the regular spheres of open source and language computing community, partly by choice, largely inevitable. It was obvious that contributions will decline after leaving Red Hat. Life at IIM has also been busier than expected. Problem with student life is that it gives you some degree of freedom, but at same time, puts enough constraints to ensure the under utilization of that freedom.

Feeling a bit sorry for missing the hat-trick for foss.in. It would have been third consecutive year of participation had I been able to do so this time. Hope things have been as interesting as ever at foss.in 2009.

Anyway. Meanwhile the only significant touch with foss has been being on the user side of it. I haven't found any instance of any linux distro (in use by students) on campus except the one I am running, that too as a parallel machine. Even the B-school guys seem to be reluctant to leave the windows world.

I used to wonder why many of the foss developers themselves enjoy using Apple products, especially Mac. Now I think I have an interpretation of it. Its best to work for open source products as a developer, but as a user you may be more content to use industry standards that have state-of-the-art technology. May be it is not all that bad, since it provides with checkpoints and models for open source products to look for. No wonder why many of the features are making the desktop distros resemble with Mac. I would personally like to see many of the Mac features on desktop gnu/linux and other foss apps. I am loving my mac but yet missing the flexibility, scalability and freedom of fedora.

The first two terms have been rapid with the second term about to get over soon. Rest of the month will be hectic for sure with many project deadlines and too many subjects for the end-terms. Wish the time-to-exam goes slow while time-to-break comes fast (more than being homesick, I am sick of this mountain now). I know both the things are not possible, but that's how the mind expects. :-)

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