FOSS Involvement:I started using GNU/Linux at IIT in 2000 (for the sake of brevity I will write Linux to mean GNU/Linux). Redhat Linux (now Fedora Core) was used at our computer center but soon I moved to Mandrake Linux (now Mandriva Linux). The love thus started is not over yet. I am still using Mandriva Linux.
Like many other FOSS believers, I was highly motivated by Eric S. Raymond's Cathedral and the Bazaar when I read it in 2001. I wrote my first FOSS software and released it under an open source licensed soon after.
Over the years, the developer's itch bothered me several times. This resulted in several new softwares that I wrote. Some of these are not relevant anymore; but in their days some of them were even included in some Linux distributions.
- jBabel
- mGet
Since 2005 I am involved with the Beagle project, the first desktop search service for Linux. Since 2006 December, I lead the development of the project and I am also one of the maintainers of the Beagle project. I also wrote several softwares related to Beagle and released them under open source licenses.
Other than the projects mentioned above, I have also contributed to numerous other open source projects, including bug-fixes and new features.
I was a mentor for the Beagle project for Google Summer of Code in 2007.