A sense of bonhomie of the -€œWe’re in this together-€ kind pervaded the convention on open source -  Owning the Future: Ideas and their role in the digital age - organized by Red Hat India on the 24th and 25th of August, at New Delhi. It did, however, see a fair amount of debate among stakeholders, and the Indian Government came in for some well informed criticism. The convention saw participation from important players from both India and abroad, and sometimes went beyond the digital domain, into the realm of a collective commons. I walked in midway through the first day to find Dr. DB Pathak from IIT Bombay talking about how creators do not benefit since they write off the copyrights to publishers and record companies. Innovation tends to happen in small groups, and big companies build their businesses around them. Later V. Ponaraj, Director (Technology Initiatives), Office of the President of India waxed ineloquently about the initiatives taken by the Government of India to support and adopt Open Source, only to be shot down during the Q&A. Questions were asked about the lack of funding that killed the Simputer project, and the fact that CDAC, which he had praised, actually uses taxpayers money for research and then charges the taxpayer for something as little as local language fonts. Taking the example of Tamil Nadu, the Government was also criticized for the lack of development of FOSS,  because of a turnover prerequisite in selection policy that actually denies several players a role in the development of FOSS. Ponaraj had little choice but to accept the failings of the powers that be. Jimmy Wales, Founder Wikipedia spoke later of where he sees the Wiki movement going - beyond the Internet - using the OLPC program; on to Mobiles (he didn’t mention Webaroo’s Wiki packs), and even print if someone is willing to print the Wiki and distribute it. Though neutrality is key to Wikipedia, he is keen on a library that represents opposing viewpoints. He also spoke about Wikia, for profit, that allows users to create their own communities via Wikis. They’ve also done a World Wikia on travel because the travel information space is too commercial otherwise, and a Muppet Wiki for Muppet fans. He shared data for India, where the number of Wikipedia articles for Bengali, Kannada and Marathi outnumber those for Hindi. Bengali sees a growth of 35% a month. Wales believes that once a language gets a community, the growth is strong. They might be looking at hiring coordinators for Hindi to get the community going, but his experience is that growth comes from passion, not for pay. The Registrar of Copyrights for India, Madhukar Sinha was the star of the next panel discussion, and stated that he’s not sure if India is ready for Open Source since it is a country concerned with wealth creation. He mentioned that there are changes in Copyright and DRM that will be recommended to the Parliament soon. The Indian government again came in for criticism for not putting content that the taxpayer had paid for into the public domain - maps, text, research, NCERT Textbooks, and AIR and DD archives. When asked repeatedly about the involvement of record companies in framing of policies on Intellectual Property Rights, he beat around the bush and then finally acknowledged that since they are impacted, there is some consultation with private companies.