foss.in partial speaker list available

Last year, I had put out a list of some of our speakers, and I am getting
bombarded by mail asking for a similar list this year.

I have hesitated largely because I thought it unfair to pick out just a
few of the many excellent speakers, but I have been assured that I
wouldn't be tarred and feathered for doing so, so here goes my completely
subjective, unqualified and randomly chosen pick of some speakers whom I'd
like to highlight for no other reason but because I felt like it:

We have been writing to Linus every year for the past 6 years inviting
him. We hope to get him sometime around Linux Kernel 7.8.16 release time.
:)

This year, we have tried to stay away from overpowering people with glitz.
We therefore decided that despite my better judgement, we wouldn't be
inviting Pamela Anderson, but we do hope that Christoph Hellwig's unique
hairstyle will make up for that.

Harald Welte has become a fixture at our event - he is here for a record
fourth year in a row, and is also our Jiminy Cricket as far as community
and FOSS content is concerned. (This is also his third time in India this
year - rumour has it that he spends more time in India than in his native
Germany).

Aaron Seigo is going to give the desktop folks a Plasma transfusion, and
will reveal what the desktop of the future (KDE4) will be like.

Andrew Cowie, the java-gnome maintainer, without doubt gave the most
impressive keynote last year with his Inside|Outside. He is going to have
a tough time following up on that this year, but knowing Andrew, we know
he is going to try. He is is Irish-Canadian living in Australia, after
all. ;)

Did I mention Christoph Hellwig already? Oh yes, I did. And to keep the
peace, he will not be speaking about directions of gcc. :P

Frederick Noronha is our one-man community volcano. Maddog has nothing on this
man. Fred has done more to community development in India than anyone else
living - or dead.

Jayakumar is going to set the halls aflame with a discussion about the Linux
kernel in the context of GPLv2 and GplV3.

Luke Kanies is going do a master of puppets.

Philip Tellis is going to pull off a really difficult one, talking about his
project libyahoo2. The difficulty level comes out of his current employment,
but then they are supportive of FOSS, aren't they?

Peter Karlsson has been a popular speaker about OpenSolaris, and drew full
houses last year.

Rasmus Lerdorf is going to strike it rich this year with PHP5.

The irrepressible Russell Nelson is going to talk about open source
licenses from the perspective of someone who is most qualified to do so,
but he is also going to pull a few rabbits out of his hat.

The unbelievable Sirtaj Sing Kang is back for a record 6th time. The year he
stops coming, we stop having the event. He is the closest we have in India to
having a FOSS superstar, and we welcome our sikh overlords!

She came, she saw and she conquered FOSS.IN last year with her excellent
talks - the first time that she ever spoke in English, and she managed to steal
audiences from Alan Cox! And she is back - Sulamita Garcia.

Suparna Bhattacharya is the only person in the whole world who can claim to
make Linus Torvalds shut up, sit down and listen. We almost failed to get her -
can you imagine how much it hurt when 120 kilos slammed onto my kneecaps as I
went down begging her to come and speak? :)

And finally there is this strange guy who does strange things in strange
places, who makes buildings dance to his tune, who makes thousands of people
pour in from across the world to attend the event that he organises, who makes
governments quake when the organisation he is part of decides to look over
their shoulders (most recently voting computers, but also biometric passports
and other things) - Tim "Blinkenlights" Pritlove of the Chaos Computer Club.

The above is just a sampling - there are many more excellent and dedicated
speakers - have a look at
http://foss.in/2006/info/02-Nov-2006_Final_List_of_talks

Atul

-- 
F O S S . I N
India's Premier FOSS Conference
November 24-26
Bangalore, India
http://foss.in/2006