Hi all,
At the outset I have to confess I’m not a developer (i.e. don’t write code). I love and enjoy free software for it makes me think. It puts me in on toes and I enjoy that. This blog post would be specifically looking at how WikiOcean celebrated the Software Freedom Day with perhaps some things we need to enhance or improvise in the future.
We decided to celebrate SFD early this year due to various reasons. One of the major reasons was that 5th September was also the International Teacher’s Day. So taking advantage of celebrating both the events as both have similar ideas i.e. love, knowledge, freedom, respect, sharing and all the positive feelings which one has for the same.
We didn’t prepare much. We thought about various formats as to what we should be celebrating. I had number of ideas but had to throw them one by one aside as either too impractical or too boring.
Finally decided on a very simple format for the celebrations.As we were celebrating inside a free software company it was but natural to share a bit about debian. Almost all the 100-150 odd desktops that we have are either running Ubuntu or OpenSuse.
So the next thing was to find an anchor to do the anchoring bit and found a beautiful anchor in Sapna
Even though it was her first time and she was nervous, she sailed through with flying colors.
Though many people are/were unaware of how and why debian packages are so good. As ours is a developer-led company I thought it would be a good idea to share with them a bit about how difficult is to become a Debian Developer.
Although I would have to confess this was in light of meeting Vid Svaksha whom I met in Bangalore when I went there recently. She wants to contribute on debian packaging and become a Debian Maintainer.
I shared whatever little I know about the process for about 30 odd minutes. Of course the whole process is put up on debian site as well. The process was basically divided into 2-3 parts.
a. Give a short re-count of GPL history
b. Give a short re-count of Ian Murdock and the birth of Debian due to rpm dependency issues (read broken) at a point in time.
c. Give a short outline from working on packages, IRC, mailing lists, getting a sponsor to sponsor patches/packages in Debian queue, the NM process all the way to becoming DD with the various things one can hit in the way.
After 30 odd minutes of talking/sharing with room for queries and questions, we moved to the next part which was a quiz.
The quiz format was also kept pretty simple. There were 4 teams of 2 people each from each product group within our company. The 4 teams were from OB development, POOL, CMS and OB Reports.
1.The format of the quiz that each team would have 9 questions with 3 questions to ask each team.
2. One of those questions could be of their own product while the others can be anything from Free Software, CMS, ERP product categories.
3. So overall 3 questions for their favour.
4. Also the questions would have to be multiple-choice single word/names in the whole thing.
5. Have a clear seperation between the audience and the participants so people would not pass answers 😉
The quiz was lotta fun as we also had refreshments during the event. The winners of the event was the team from GNUPOOL.
Everybody had loads of fun.
At the end of the day I would like to thank SFD for giving us schwag and a reason to celebrate 😉
Wikiocean for a place so that everybody had a great time.
Priyanka and Sapna specifically of CMS team for making it bug-free.
Looking foward to comments, suggesetions to making it even better the next time around 🙂
P.S. :- One can look at the album for the photos at the photostream
Experiences in the community 
Just to add have a look at this page
https://nm.debian.org/
This tells you precisely how the process works.