#279 Airplane Logs (FOSSASIA Summit 2024)

Hello from the sky!

I’m writing this from an airplane 30,000 feet above the Indian Ocean around what I think is Malaysia. I have written a lot of these logs from airports around the world, but writing from the lower stratosphere is a first.

This is because of many reasons:

1. I book cheap international flights, which are almost always in the middle of the night, and I sleep.
2. Cheap flights are always full and cramped to write anything good.
3. Reading on flights instead is very effective as it forces you to focus on long-form reading, which is hard to do on land where there’s internet and distractions.

But today’s flight from Singapore to Coimbatore is uncharacteristically empty. It might be because they switched the airplane model to an Airbus A321neo, which has more seats than the previous model used on this route.

I’m also uncharacteristically away from all the loud children and talkative uncles, which put me in a clear mind to read some essays. Reading always inspires me to write. And when I thought about it, I’m unlikely to find free time this week to reflect on my time spent at the FOSSASIA Summit and Hanoi with me jumping on another flight to Pune for the Kubernetes Community Days tomorrow. So, the constraints the metal box in the sky puts me in becomes uncharacteristically enjoyable.

On a side thought, I wonder how people with kids generally pick where to sit on flights. Is there data on this? Can I use this data to find optimal seats for my future travels? And what about the seating algorithm used by IRCTC? Can someone who worked on it explain why an eighteen-year-old me could never find a beautiful girl sitting across me like the movies made me believe? I get it now; teenage boys are always paired with families going on poorly planned trips, so they can conveniently switch me to a seat four compartments away.

Bringing my thoughts back to reality and to Hanoi now.

Like last time, the FOSSASIA Summit did a good job of bringing a big enough umbrella to host a variety of communities and projects. There were many familiar faces from last year’s event and other conferences in Asia, and I spent a lot of time catching up with them.

I also met a lot of new people, but there wasn’t enough time or energy to continue all those conversations as I wanted to but I’m pretty sure I will run into them sometime in the future.

Roger Dingledine, the creator of Tor was at the conference. His talk was quite insightful, and we kept running into each other in the hallway, so I had the opportunity to have some very educational conversations that I will make sure to follow up on. Vietnam is an interesting place to talk about privacy and security and the extent to which governments extend their control over its citizens. My understanding of public policy—particularly about government intervention—helped me understand similar concepts within Tor’s operation.

Tor is primarily funded by the US Government, and unsurprisingly, my reaction was, “Wouldn’t that defeat the inherent security of the Tor network” with a government being a major stakeholder. I also assumed that the reason the US government would want to fund Tor is only because of this reason. However, the reality is that the US government and its agencies are also among the top users of Tor. The beauty of this is that the US government would benefit if more users used Tor. i.e., they are incentivized to leave Tor as it is without government control.

I felt there was a larger crypto crowd than last year, with the Ethereum community being one of the biggest sponsors of the event. I’m wary of crypto and, by extension, the entire blockchain community solely because I haven’t seen any problem that it uniquely solves. I don’t think I’m alone here, and the pump-and-dump bros on Twitter aren’t helping.

An interesting lens through which to view the crypto-blockchain landscape is that of altruism. If the community wants to be included in the free and open source world, it has to follow the altruistic nature of open source communities rather than the capitalistic pyramid schemes.

FOSS United had a booth at the conference, and Vishal talked about the FOSS landscape in India and how FOSS United is helping shape it. An excellent point he mentioned during the talk was the rise of non-FOSS communities in India. While he didn’t mention any names, he obviously meant the Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta-led developer and student groups.

I think it is absolutely fine to use the products offered by these companies, and I’m not condemning their community initiatives, as they have helped foster the culture around communities and software for years, but it inadvertently puts FOSS communities and projects at a disadvantage.

FOSS communitiies are usually volunteer driven and operate on minimum or no funds while these other communities have access to big tech wallets and their resources. Recognizing this issue is itself a right step forward and communities like FOSS United are encouraging more FOSS communities to grow in even the smaller cities in the country.

FOSSASIA Summit is and will continue to be one of the best tech conferences in the world. However, one trend I noticed that might cause this train to derail is the proliferation of sponsored speaking slots.

I understand that conferences will have marketing. Even I plug Apache APISIX in my talks (although it is open source), and that helps us get customers, which in turn helps me travel the world and talk to people about open source. But throwing an exorbitant amount of money and effectively hijacking the conference can quickly be problematic.

In any case, I found most of the sales pitch talks from the conference uninteresting and skipped them for quality conversations in the hallway.

Although I have been to Vietnam before, this was my first time in Hanoi. I spent the weekend exploring the city by foot and food.

The conference had enough social events to unwind and talk about different things that tech even though these conversations invariably ended up in tech or tech policy.

I stuck to my word and had a lot of beer.

We had planned a trip to Ha Long Bay before, but because I was alone on this trip, I decided to skip it for yet another time. Vietnam is growing on me, and at least five people have offered to host and take me around when I’m in Hanoi next time. So, another return to Vietnam feels increasingly inevitable.

A friend from Thailand also showed me some photos from his sabbatical spent in rural Thailand, which sowed a new seed in my brain about backpacking across Southeast Asia with a backpack full of clothes and a laptop. Doing this in 2024 seems highly unlikely unless I’m there for work.

I look through my window and see nothing but the darkness of the sky and the ocean beneath. I stare into the darkness and pause for a while before I try to re-stimulate my brain with a sci-fi novel on my Kindle.