FOSDEM 2009

FOSDEM (Free and OpenSource Developers Meeting) takes places every year in Brussels, Belgium on the campus of the UniversitÈ Libre de Bruxelles.

I went this year, for the first time, this post is all about that.

First of all, I had a great time. It was one very fun and pleasant weekend.

So, what is FOSDEM all about? It’s a Developers Meeting. People from around the globe come to FOSDEM to talk, meet other developers, give presentations and have fun (yes even we nerds are capable of socializing and having fun).

FOSDEM lasts two days. It begins Saturday around 11h00 with the opening keynote and ends Sunday at around 18h15 after the closing keynote. The great thing about FOSDEM is that even as a small developer, you can attract people and give a presentation. It is completely irrelevant if you sponsor the event or not, you’re not treated otherwise. Hence FOSDEM is a great opportunity especially for small and uprising companies and developers to attract attention to what they’re doing. This makes the event a bunch of fun too, ’cause you actually get to see some real innovation in our field.

Saturday:

We started of on time and arrived at the ULB campus quite on time, we were even able to park the car on the parking deck. The opening keynote was presented by Mozilla by Mark Surman. He had a few quite interesting things to say and he had extremely good slides. Nonconformist slides yet extremely pleasant to read and follow the presentation about a Free and Open Future.

Next up was Debian. Bdale Garbee was the presenter, sponsored by HP. I can easily say it was probably one of the worst presentations I saw at FOSDEM. The guy talked about himself for a good ten minutes, talking about stuff like satellites, small picture frames, his LEVEL-3 rocketlauncher thingy certification and how he had his beard shaven to raise money for charity. Do we care? No we don’t ’cause we didn’t go to that presentation for such things. Eventually he started on the real presentation. Slides where horrible, dull, boring, cluttered. The guy had lost my attention by the time he got started and I can’t say I found the presentation interesting at all, I can hardly remember what was said which is sad, ’cause I can remember all the other ones pretty well. Bad, bad, BAD Debian.

After that it was time for lunch and we went to hang some posters for HAR 2009. At around 14h00 we actually wanted to go to the “Intro to Ada for Programmers” but unfortunately the room was filled so we ended up at Wt in the openEmbedded room, a web toolkit for embedded devices which borrows heavily from Qt. I found the whole thing quite interesting (despite my lack of interest when it comes to embedded stuff) and the presentation wasn’t half bad. The Flemish pronunciation and accent in the guy’s English did get on my nerves after a while when he kept on pronouncing Wt as ‘Wiitea’ instead of ‘Double-u-t.’ According to their website, it should be pronounced as ‘witty.’

We then skipped along to the KOffice 2 presentation (by Marijn Kruisselbrink) in the KDE Dev-Room which I found quite interesting (the logo is seriously cool too. Albeit Marijn was a bit nervous and the presentation was a tad bit short but what was told was relevant and with decent slides to explain and visualize it all. If KOffice and the work Marijn has been doing on fully porting KDE to the Mac come true, I might just switch my default Office Suite.

After that we were of to Buglab’s modular hardware presentation (openEmbedded room, again). They’ve created a small computer, the BUG with a few interfaces to which you can attach other BUG modules to create a gadget of your choice. I found this extremely interesting and the whole modularity of the BUG got me quite excited about what BUGlabs is doing. Unfortunately, the other half of the presentation ended up to be all about their developer tools and the Eclipse plugin they had created… A lot less interesting.

After that we went to the X.org room, for a presentation by Intel on their GFX projects for the coming year. Though interesting for everyone who understood it was way above my head, oh well…

To finish of the day we went to the Lightning Talks. A short, timed, 15min presentation for developer to tell the audience what they and their product are all about. We saw the last bit of ‘mobile development’ I think and then saw BUG (again) and usbpicprog.

After that, we skipped to downtown Brussels for dinner and went for a drink later on at the Sablon, after that, it was bedtime.

Sunday:

We started a bit too late on Sunday and we started with a presentation from Dag Wieers titled ‘Enterprise Linux competitive landscape’ which was quite interesting and convinced me to never ever ever run RHEL or CentOS, so Dag, thank you! It was basically all about why you want long term support and why you should never want to run the latest versions of stuff like apache or mysql and how even as an end-user you’d be better of with an Enterprise Linux distribution. Another advantage he added was that if we all kept to Enterprise Linux’es and their (outdated) stable packages we’d have a bigger community to solve those issues because lots and lots of people would have the same issues (bad bad BAD Ubuntu for providing up to date packages and constant fixes, bad bad BAD). I wonder why I even bother with RPM-people anymore . Besides the (in my opinion) strange reasons for Enterprise Linux on the desktop it was quite an interesting presentation about RHEL vs. CentOS. The most fun part though was the beginning, where he showed us a new hack he wrote to control a presentation over bluetooth with a WiiMote, including buzzing when he was running out of time for a slide or presentation etc.

After Dag had saturated us with his RPM-ness we went to Upstart (yes, finally, Debian/Ubuntu geeks). Upstart is an event-driven init daemon replacement which can do seriously cool stuff like starting services only if other services or events have occurred etc. The only slightly frustrating part was the font the guy used for code snippets in his presentation. A few letters were much too spaced so actually breaking up words.

Lunch time. We ended up taking the car and going downtown for a Subway lunch which cost us the beginning of the MediaWIki presentation. The rest of the afternoon we followed the Collab track, which also included Zarafa and CalDAV.

I found Zarafa extemely interesting. The presentation was one of the best at FOSDEM and I learned quite a few things. It also clarified for me why Zarafa chose (My)SQL to store all its data (including mail) and why they actually need a separate Outlook connector even though Zarafa implements z-push.

CalDAV was the last on my list. Though I learned a few things about CalDAV and why it is so badly supported (mostly due to laziness or wanting to support Exchange more than an open standard) the presentation itself was frustrating. The guy was German with a noticeable accent and pronunciation who tried to be funny and failed at it every single time. I found the presentation to be of bad quality which was tried to be made up for by using fancy Keynote.app effects, bad idea. The most annoying part was the statements the guy made without giving any solid reasoning for the ‘why’ behind it all. Like when he stated that when you want to implement or add support for GroupDAV / CalDAV you shouldn’t use any available libraries, just do it yourself with libcurl. Why? He didn’t say so, it just was the case, according to him.

All set and done we went to the closing keynote which was given by Leslie Hawthorn from Google about Google’s Summer of Code and Google Highly Open Participation Contest programs. I have never seen someone give a presentation so enthusiastically, almost mesmerizing the audience, just riding the wave as she built up momentum. It was a worthy closing keynote so thank you, Google for giving your personal a decent media training.

I had great fun at FOSDEM. Met a lot of new interesting people, learned a lot of new interesting things which also gave me a few things to think about as to where I’m going, what I still want to do and achieve.

The only part I regret is that I didn’t manage to meet up with a few people working on and using Funambol and have a chat with them, I guess we’ll just have to organize a European Funambol meeting ourselves.