Please give a brief introduction of yourself

I am a subversion developer who is passionate about Free software. I did my under graduation in Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai. Right from my college days I was interested in Free software and attracted towards its philosophy. During college days we gave a complete free software based solution for day to day activities using free software technologies (http://www.stylesen.org/tcenet_best_innovative_project_of_the_year_2007_by_pcquest), which was the time when my Free software journey started.


What are your contributions to FOSS projects ?

I develop subversion which is one of the most popular free software project today. I am the Second Indian Full committer for this project and had contributed some features especially things like password/passphrase caching using GNOME Keyring. Almost all softwares which I worked with are FOSS and available for download. Another notable contribution was TCENet which fetched my team “The Most Innovative Project of the Year” award from PCQuest competing with the software majors. I have a rank (900+) too in ohloh ;)


What will your talk be, exactly ?

I will be presenting two talks. First one is “Collaborative Software Development” which is based on my experience in developing free softwares and CollabNet’s products which are based on Collaborative software development environment. Second will be on my area of interest “Version Control Systems” in which I ll explain version control systems in layman terms and touch upon the two major types of version control system existing today centralized and distributed.


What do you hope to accomplish by delivering this talk? What do you expect ?

I would like to make people, understand about collaborative environments for software development and emphasis on the usefulness of version control systems which will help them to develop softwares in a smart way.


What kind of tools you are developing at collabnet ?

We develop “Subversion”! CollabNet has products such as “CollabNet Enterprise Edition” which is legacy now, and the future is “CollabNet TeamForge”. If you don’t understand what these tools are visit tigris.org, openoffice.org, java.net. These are just the community sites (there are lots more), but CollabNet supports many Software companies to manage their projects and provides an environment for them to collaborate.


With so many new open source version controls available, how do you think Subversion will handle the competition ?

At last we have some real competitors ;) But this is fun since we are part of advancing the “State of the Art”! Think about a world with just Coke, it would have been boring, thats why Pepsi came in, the same thing happens in the version control industry we have DVCS now. But there are lot of advantages of using Subversion in corporate environment, when you attend my talk you can get a clear picture of these differences.


What kind of projects you recommend to be based on Subversion, instead of other version control systems ?

When you are new to Version control and you have a large team in a corporate environment Subversion suits your needs. If you want a ready to go, simple to learn and easy to use Version control system, then Subversion fits your bill. You can rely on Subversion for project of any sizes.


What’s the most important piece of advice you would give to people working on their first contribution to any FOSS project ?

No patch is trivial! You are making a difference!


Have you enjoyed previous editions of gnunify ?

This is my first GNUnify, I expect a lot of fun and excited about meeting new people from the Free Software world :)