Bangalore’s open source community crams into conference to learn, network, and share.

Approximately 1,500 attendees turned up Friday for FOSS.in, a free event in Bangalore that the open source community in India has been planning for months.

Organizer Atul Chitnis expects a deluge on Saturday. “I don’t know how we’ll fit them in,” he said with delight. “There are not enough chairs here and people are standing to listen to the talks.”

Mr. Chitnis almost skipped a vegetarian lunch that was served for the crowd as he waited for more chairs to arrive. In the spirit of the open source philosophy, he didn’t delegate the job to a junior staff member.

The open source community has been growing in India, but there’s no way to affix a number to it, he said.

Pointing to a stall sponsored by ABB, the Swedish engineering giant, he said the movement was slowly gathering steam.

“Some of those guys were involved in making this event happen years ago, and are now working on an open source robotics project,” he said. The ABB folks, in true big corporate style, were cagey but said about 15 people in its India office were working on several open source projects.

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