Fosdem Report

I was in Brussels over the weekend at Fosdem, the “Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting”. Seems to me if should be called “Fossdem” (or, considering the preponderance of German-speaking attendees, maybe “Foßdem”?), but I guess that didn’t fit on the T-shirts or something. The software industry conferences that I’ve attended in the past have been relatively snazzy affairs, most notably the champagne-swilling, peeled-jumbo-shrimp-with-cocktail-sauce-gobbling extravaganzas of the dot com era. Fosdem, in contrast, struck me as a kind of 21st century Woodstock with free wifi instead of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll.

Since I still think Debian is a girl’s name and Ubuntu is a kind of Japanese food, I stayed away from the conference proper, taking refuge in the Mozilla Developers’ Room. It was great to finally meet some of the people I’ve been hanging out with incessantly on IRC for the past few months. Unfortunately the aforementioned free wifi barely worked (proving once again that in the world of free, you usually get what you paid for), otherwise we could have gotten a ripping backchannel together on #developers.

I gave a talk on Sunday morning entitled “AllPeers - Perspectives on Extension Development”, which was reasonably well-attended despite the hangover-defying start time of 9:15am. I decided a while ago that bulletpoints are irredeemably evil, so I went crazy with Google Images and put a picture on each slide to guide the presentation flow and give the audience something to look at while I blathered on. I’d like to make a screencast of the presentation but I might have to adapt it so it doesn’t violate any copyrights.

Despite the name, Fosdem wasn’t attended only by developers, and I had very interesting chats with Tristan Nitot (President of Mozilla Europe) and Paul Kim (Mozilla’s Director of Marketing). One of the nice things about open source is that even the marketing and sales types really get it. There’s a lot of idle talk about this-and-that community, but in the case of open source and Mozilla, the moniker is truly apt. I won’t be trading in my top hat and cane just yet for a pair of sandals and a granola bar, but it’s hard to deny the appeal of a movement where people are friendly, straightforward, smart and genuinely care about what they’re doing. I’m looking forward to the next gathering.

Update: Robert Kaiser, aka KaiRo, has posted some photos including a couple of me, me, me! Evidently I really did gain a lot of weight during my ten days in the U.S. It must be something in the air.

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1 Comment »

1. Fosdem sunday in the mozilla room

   Sunday like most of saturday I stayed in the mozilla room at fosdem [I only left on Saturday to join the key signing party]. The topics were a lot more technical on sunday than on saturday which was good and…

   Trackback by Ludovic's weblog — 2/28/2006 @ 10:25 am

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