Minutes – ILUGC Feb 2017 meet

Indian Linux Users Group, Chennai community is meeting every month second saturday at Aerospace Engineering, IIT Madras.

Yesterday, we had out feb 2017 meeting.

Ajay started with Various open source licenses available and explored their pros and cons. Explained how the Open Core business model is helping many companies to do their business by open sourcing the core of their software with releasing the other components as proprietary software.

See the slides here

http://slides.com/danatic/licensing#/

 

Then, Viswaprasath from Mozilla Tamilnadu community explained about Firefox’s new web extensions api. Now we can build cross browser extensions using simple HTML/JavaScript/CSS stack. No need to play around with XUL. He explained the architecture of a simple plugin he developed.

Few links to explore on this

http://thehackernews.com/2015/08/mozilla-firefox-web-extensions.html

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions

https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/09/lets_write_a_webextension/

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Your_first_WebExtension

 

Then, Karthik from Mozilla Tamilnadu, explored webVR. Virtual reality using browser. Now with Three.js we can create 3d worlds that can be viewed on browser itself.

A-frame is a Javascript framework on top of threejs.

Few links

https://aframe.io/

https://aframe.io/docs/0.5.0/introduction/

https://aframe.io/aframe-presentation-kit/

Then, he explained how the mozilla Tamilnadu community is working to spread Free/Open Software on colleges and organizations.

Join the awesome community to learn and contribute for free software.

https://mozillatn.github.io/

https://www.facebook.com/MozillaTN

https://web.telegram.org/#/im?p=@mozillatnc

 

Then, I gave a lightning talk on few projects ideas to do. A firefox plugin to help proofreading tamil wikisource, flipboard alternate in tamil, epub cleaning for FreeTamilEbooks.com, Download report for wikisource ebooks, web application for OCR4WikiSource, Translating city/street names in Tamil for building maps in Tamil. Will write a new post with all the details of these project ideas.

Asked for contributors and ideas. Students from S.Joseph Institute of Tech accepted to help on these projects. We can have a hackathon to do these projects.

Reply here if you know any place to conduct a one day hackathon.

Finally, asked all to join in ILUGC mailing list at https://www.freelists.org/list/ilugc

Our meetings will end on the cafe nearby. old mohan, new mohan, yogesh, myself and other one(sorry dude, still trying to get your name) had great discussions at cafe on building Tamil Text to Speech engine, Advantages of go over python and a lot.

Returned to home by bus with Mohan, discussing various tech, social, academic, industry trends. Interacting with energetic young people makes me feel encouraged to learn new things always.

Thanks for all the speakers and participants for building a wonderful community for GNU/Linux. Let us hope to have more events like hackathon, FossConf etc, this year.

Few photos

https://goo.gl/photos/T3TSFw6vfcMFfwyN8