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

Atul ('toolz' on IRC) has been an influence over the tech crowd in India for years - a lot of people (techies / hackers) were introduced to Linux, and Open Source in general by his enthusiastic stage-speaks or writings on web / magazines.

The events Linux/Bangalore and later FOSS.IN used to be the hacker gatherings, and the conversations were fantastic in these events. Atul celebrated hackers, and I recall him calling out Gopal V ('t3rminat0r' - twitter/IRC) on stage who had ported dotGNU Portable .NET to Encore Simputer during LB/2004.

Atul also propelled the concept of small-distributed Linux enthusiast meetings (BoFs) across Bangalore city (this was in 2004/2005), which essentially meant that techies found niche groups to meet up and interact (mostly over tea/coffee, less on beers), instead of waiting for big conferences to happen. He ran a BBS earlier in the 90s, and knew how to get people to interact IRL when BBSes went dead in 2000s.

Atul has been a person who celebrated Technology, and influenced a lot of other people to see the view. Rest in Peace, toolz.

I feel like a kid when I hear these stories. As an Indian, and not having any exposure(nor the means to afford to get some exposure) to computers.

My first date with a computer was in school around 1999. Our school principal had bought a Desktop which could only run DOS. No one in the school knew what a computer even was. A kid ran back to his home to bring the game 'Lion King' from his home on a Floppy disk. He successfully booted the PC and ran the game on it. It was the most fascinating moment of my whole life to stand in a room full of 200 kids to watch the black magic happen.

I have very interesting stories coming back from those days. I've done some ingenious and some super stupid things out of curiosity.

Atul was one of my biggest gateways into Linux and FOSS in general. I'd venture that he was face of FOSS evangelism in India. Most of what he wrote was firmly opinionated and highly informative. He was also a massively interesting person to talk to, and I came away quite frankly awestruck by the man when our paths crossed occasionally during FOSS.IN 2009.

I am devastated by this news. RIP.

He chaired the committee that ran and organized foss.in - (un)arguably India's greatest open source event.

Held every December, it attracted thousands of students and working professionals from across the country. It helped set the image of Linux and the wider OSS community fairly high in the country.

I remember going to my first foss.in in 2008. It was brilliant and I felt exhilarated that I could meet with people like minded as myself - who had all come to know about OSS via other efforts. It was India's first gathering of like minded "hackers"[1].

I've met some really great people through foss.in - they've all inspired me with their work on Mozilla, PHP, KDE, etc.. I think pre-GSOC, foss.in was the most significant if not the only torch-bearer of open source in India.

I was very upset when they shut it down after 10+ years in 2011 - the team had apparently felt that their job of infusing Linux in the student population was sort of accomplished.

He was a pretty great guy!

[1]"hackers": the way ESR would call 'em if he could. Selfless, extremely smart, lets-get-things-done people, with tens of contributions to the open source world.

Actually it was a CD not a DVD, at least for a few years!