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I'll let you guess which one of these two gentlemen is Arun Sharma. |
Arun was born and brought up in Karnataka, India. He
speaks many
languages including Konkani, Kannada, English and some Bollywood style
Hindi. He understands a bit of Marathi, Malayalam, Java, Python and
Tulu as well.
In recent years, Arun has been an active open source developer working
on Linux, FreeBSD and Xen projects. He has three
patents pending in the area of computer architecture and
virtualization.
Arun started a mailing list called linux-india circa 1996 on his
desktop linux box when he was still at the University of Illiniois,
mainly to pursue his dreams of creating an alternate desktop operating
system using the nearly unlimited man power available in India. Nearly
ten years later, people are still trying without much success. The
mailing list however was wildly
successful beyond his expectations.
During one of the linux conferences, Arun got a couple of old FreeBSD
CDs and was instantly attracted to the high quality code, technical
discussion and a liberal license. This was around the time money,
corporate sponsorship, contracts and regional rivalries were making
linux-india a much less friendly place than it used to be.
Since then, he started bsd-india,
which has continued to this date as a low volume, friendly mailing
list. Arun has been a FreeBSD committer for sometime. He worked on ia64
initially and x86 and powerpc more recently. Lately, Arun has been messing
with Mac OS X, which gives him a UNIX command line as well as a nice
windowing system with a small and quiet box. Good things really come in
small packages!
He can be reached by email at arun at sharma-home dot net.