Bangalore: Every techie harbours a special affection for Open Source Technology and its popularity is growing by the day. Although there were many impediments to rapid adoption earlier, organizations are currently making use of a blend of open source and proprietary software on a day to day basis.It has also been recently reported that the success of Obama's campaign relied on its IT strategy which made use of open source tools and architecture.

To discuss the current trends in the space, the vast benefits of Open Source and how it will pave the IT future, Open Source Conference was held on November 24. The sessions were tailored for developers who make use of open source technologies.

This exciting event had two tracks focusing on Applications and the other on Customizing Open Source products.

The keynote session covered "MySQL strategy- State of Dolphin" and was presented by Chandra Balani, MySQL Database Country Sales Sr. Manager and Megha Singhvi, Open Source Evangelist at Oracle India.

Suparna Bhattacharya, a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM Research India, kick started the conference in the Applications track with an interesting session on “How the Linux Kernel has Sustained Diversity without Giving up on Efficiency". She stated, “As the Linux kernel has evolved over the years to satisfy the needs of diverse operating environments, containing code and data bloat has become increasingly challenging. Yet Linux has maintained a remarkable track record of sustaining a high rate of change for almost a decade since the beginning of the 2.6 kernel series. Although the code size has increased to 15 million lines, run-time efficiency remains a central concern in kernel programming.

The trick lies in adopting development patterns that minimize overheads of feature generality in code paths where it is not needed. New contributors are thus urged to carefully craft their proposed code changes in incremental steps of simple logically self contained patches for ease of review and maintenance. It sounds easy enough, but getting used to "thinking in patches" is harder than it appears."

Her talk explained why that is so and why it is still worth the effort. In particular, she covered a few examples of how deceptively simple patterns of development can help evolve code that is both flexible and efficient in the long run.