2004.05_Fosdem 2004-Brussels Developers' Conference Report.pdf

COMMUNITY

FOSDEM 2004

Weekend Chat

FOSDEM is the Free and Open Source Developers Meeting that takes place

each year in Belgium’s capital city of Brussels. The meeting can be split into

two halves. BY JOHN SOUTHERN

Figure 2: Jon “Maddog” Hall explaining history.

lectures and tutorials which take

place over a weekend, This year

started with an opening speech by Tim

O’Reilly of O’Reilly books. Everyone lis-

tens to the opening speech and the

traditional talk by Richard Stallman.

RMS gave his traditional speech,

including his Saint IGNUcius sketch,

where he blesses the crowd and indoc-

torates them in the Church of Emacs.

Love, who talked about the kernel and

its affects on the desktop. Followed by

2.6 Internals and then Hans Reiser took

listeners on a tour of Reiser 4.

In the tutorials, scripting languages

included Ruby and NetBeans. Everyone

then met for the Free Software Award,

which was won by Alan Cox, and the

singing of the Free Software song.

Sunday started with streams on X and

Java. In the tutorial room, rather than

hour long talks, we were treated to sev-

enteen short fifteen minute talks.

FOSDEM is unique amongst confer-

ences. It is organized by Raphael

Bauduin and his team. These are Linux

fans and although volunteers, they pro-

duce a wonderfully organized event.

The talks vary. Some were very profes-

sional, others are not quite so good. At

FOSDEM, this can be an advantage.

These speakers are the best in their field

and you would otherwise miss these top-

ics. Some surprise, and give a real

passion and enthusiasm to their subject.

An example of this was Dodji Seketeli

and his talk on the MlView project, an

xml editor for GNOME environment.

Later saw the security stream and the

scripting languages deal with

SmartEiffel, Perl and Ruby.

Tutorials covered accessibility

and Linux kernel.

Everyone finally met up for

the closing talk by Jon “Mad-

dog” Hall. Where crowd wept

tears of joy.

Some community stands

are present and included

Mozilla Europe, OpenBSD,

who went out of their way to

be helpful and friendly and

the FSF Europe with our Pres-

ident Georg Greve available

for all to talk to.

Talking

The second half of FOSDEM is just as

important. It is the community activities.

Those that can spare the Friday evening,

meet in the Roy d’Espagne for an

evening of Belgian beer.

Although the beer is wonderful, many

do not drink and still go because this is

where you meet up others and get a

chance to chat about what everyone

thinks are the important developments.

This chatting to like minded strangers,

allows for the exchange of ideas and

should be encouraged. As everyone is

linked by Free and Open source soft-

ware, you find that everyone wants to

talk to you. They want to tell you of

some interesting development, gossip or

technique and want to know what you

do and your opinions on every subject.

The Saturday evening is similar with

an organized buffet and a pub meet. This

cross fertilization of ideas gives FOSDEM

such a strong community feel.

Talks

The lectures are split into streams to

allow more of a variety. Three full

streams occurred alongside a host of

developer meetings. Anyone with an

interest can wander in and learn about

the topic or help with the development.

This year we had eight developer

rooms including Debian, Tcl, KDE and

Embedded Linux. A Hackers room was

very popular with wireless networking.

Saturday afternoon saw an Accessibil-

ity stream which included Braille and

Speech output, Gnome Onscreen Key-

board and the KDE Accessibility Project.

One of the most popular talks was in

the Linux Kernel stream with Robert

Costs

Due to the absence of major commercial-

ization, FOSDEM only has a few

sponsors such as O’Reilly Books,

Linux.com and Linux Magazine. Visitors

are encouraged to make a donation of 25

Euros. This get you a Tee-shirt and those

that donate more can get O’Reilly books,

entrance to the Saturday buffet meal and

a chance to win subscriptions.

■

INFO

Figure 1: FOSDEM 2004 was held at the Université Libre de

Bruxelles (ULB).

[1] Photos of Fosdem: http://fosdem.3ti.be/

[2] Main Fosdem site:

http://www.fosdem.org/

[3] Lecture slides portal: http://www.fosdem.

org/2004/index/news/

[4] BudgetFosdem: http://wiki.gllug.org.uk/

cgi-bin/moin.cgi/BudgetFosdem

May 2004

www.linux-magazine.com

FOSDEM 2004

T he first half is the organized talks,

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