| He chaired the committee that ran and organized foss.in - (un)arguably India's greatest open source event. Held every December, it attracted thousands of students and working professionals from across the country. It helped set the image of Linux and the wider OSS community fairly high in the country. I remember going to my first foss.in in 2008. It was brilliant and I felt exhilarated that I could meet with people like minded as myself - who had all come to know about OSS via other efforts. It was India's first gathering of like minded "hackers"[1]. I've met some really great people through foss.in - they've all inspired me with their work on Mozilla, PHP, KDE, etc.. I think pre-GSOC, foss.in was the most significant if not the only torch-bearer of open source in India. I was very upset when they shut it down after 10+ years in 2011 - the team had apparently felt that their job of infusing Linux in the student population was sort of accomplished. He was a pretty great guy! [1]"hackers": the way ESR would call 'em if he could. Selfless, extremely smart, lets-get-things-done people, with tens of contributions to the open source world. |
It was clear from seeing people interact with Atul that people really respected him.