R.I.P Atul Chitnis : The Man Who Changed the Open Source World

Bombay, 1999 - my first ever Internet connection was a VSNL shell account that could barely load Yahoo.com on Windows 98.

PCQuest, the (paper) magazine which Atul edited, bundled a CD with a new distro of Linux (or KDE or GNOME) with each month's magazine and became my introduction to the world of Linux, and soon there after to programming for fun.

Sad to learn that he is no more.

This comes as a shock for me, he was young. I had no idea Atul had been battling cancer for an year.

Here are the ways Atul touched my life:

  In the days before the Internet was accessible in India, he ran a dial up BBS, and it was a small group of users who were members of all BBSes. It was interesting to read up opinions of informed people. Topics ranged from computing to women's rights.

  He would write interesting articles for PCQuest, a valuable resource before the internet made print magazines obsolete

  He ran a Linux user group

  A few years ago I rediscovered him on the internet. He was passionately exposing the scam MBA provider, Arindam Chaudhuri. This is commendable on its own, as a lot of ill informed people to this day pay large sums of money to Arindam to get a business degree worth nothing.

I never expected to find out about the passing of one of my closest friends via HN.

I'm sure others will find better ways to articulate the below.

Atul was a wonderful human being. Others know him as the face of open source in India, the man who with his writing, his enthusiasm and his unlimited passion willed the FOSS community forward in India. There is a reason why almost anyone who was involved with open source in India knew his name and probably recalled him fondly.

Me, I know him, as one of my closest friend and mentor. Never missing a chance to poke fun at my Microsoft past, he was a huge source of inspiration and friendship to me and my wife.

His last tweet quotes Pink Floyd's "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" - that is exactly what he was.

Atul, we'll miss you beyond what mere words can express.

PCQuest ensured that even though general net connectivity and speed in India lagged behind for a while (due to government restrictions and then for a long time because the state-monopoly ISP, VSNL, priced their substandard service exhorbitantly), the Linux revolution reached India almost as it happened. Without those monthly CDs Linux would have been impossible for many of us to download with slow modems and a Lynx browser. The first ever CD they included contained OS/2 warp, though - this was '94-ish.