LCC (or Linux Campus Club) is an organization that was started in 2004 under the department of Computer Science SJCE Mysore India, with a primary goal of fostering the use of free open source software among the students. For the last three years they have been hosting an annual event called FOSSCamp to accelerate the awareness of Open-Source philosophy, tools and systems. This year they had invited me over to be chief guest at their FOSSCamp 2010 event (29th October to 31st October).
The inaugural event was a crowd puller. About 150 people attended the event, most of them students of engineering ofcourse. From the CS HOD’s talk I gathered that LCC has over 200 registered members. I find that pretty impressive. As a technical education institution it is inspiring to note that over the past few years, they have moved all their computer systems completely to FOSS.
On Saturday (30th of October), I gave a 2 hour workshop of sorts on Qt. About 130 students attended the talk. It was surprising for me to see so much of interest in Qt! A few of the students had already explored Qt. Almost everyone had heard about Qt; but there were some misconceptions about it. I spent my 2 hours clearing those misconceptions and showcasing for them what’s possible with Qt.
In all it was a wonderful experience for me. I enjoyed talking to that crowd. I would surely love to go back and see them again!