History of the Event

In the year 1999, the then nascent Indian FOSS community felt the need to expand its activities beyond the well-trodden path of advocacy, by seeking greater involvement with potential users, businesses, enterprises, etc.

To achieve this, the community decided to participate in India's most prestigious Information Technology event at that time – Bangalore IT.COM. Much to its delight, the visionary government of Karnataka (whose capital Bangalore is), recognising the rising phenomenon of Free & Open Source Software, decided to give the community an entire pavilion, tagged the “Linux Pavilion”, named after the best known FOSS project – Linux.

The FOSS community participated under the motto “Seeing is Believing”, displaying to astonished audiences the power and advances of FOSS. By the end of the event, the media had tagged the Linux Pavilion “the jewel in the crown of Bangalore IT.COM”.

The community successfully repeated its magic the following year, at Bangalore IT.COM 2000, but added a new feature – instead of just exhibiting things, the community arranged for a number of technical and non-technical talks at a nearby conference complex. This combination of talks and exhibition turned out to be so well received that the community decided to hold its own event from the next year.

And so, in December of 2001, Linux Bangalore was born.

Held at the prestigious National Science Seminar Centre at the Indian Institute of Science, LB/2001 was an a major success – in its maiden event, it saw audiences exceeding 1000 delegates from across India, and speakers included people from academia, industry and even from abroad.

The next two years saw LB/2002 and LB/2003 being organised, each time bigger, more innovative, with more content, bigger names, and more delegates from India and abroad.

By the time LB/2004 rolled around, the event was literally bursting at its seams – LB/2004 saw almost 3000 delegates attending the event. And it was drawing delegates and speakers from across India and the world. Speakers names read like a Who is Who of the FOSS world, including well known names such as Wietse Venema, Harald Welte, Brian Behlendorf, Andi Kleen, Volker Grassmuck, Deepak Saxena, Scott Wheeler, Werner Almesberger, Andrew Cowie, Bdale Garbee, Rasmus Lerdorf, Jeremy Zawodny, Miguel de Icaza, Nat Friedman, etc.

The event had always been extremely developer focussed, but the community was clamouring for a wider scope, and also for it to be more inclusive of other FOSS technologies, including *BSD, FOSS under Windows and MacOS, FOSS community issues, etc.

Clearly, the narrow scope of Linux Bangalore was not going to serve the purpose, and the decision was taken to move to a new venue, have a wider scope, have more days, and a new name to signify all these changes.

And so the new event sees its first incarnation as FOSS.IN/2005.