COMMUNITY FOSDEM 2004

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.

he first half is the organized talks, Love, who talked about the kernel and Talking lectures and tutorials which take its affects on the desktop. Followed by The second half of FOSDEM is just as Tplace over a weekend, This year 2.6 Internals and then Hans Reiser took important. It is the community activities. started with an opening speech by Tim listeners on a tour of Reiser 4. Those that can spare the Friday evening, O’Reilly of O’Reilly books. Everyone lis- In the tutorials, scripting languages meet in the Roy d’Espagne for an tens to the opening speech and the included Ruby and NetBeans. Everyone evening of Belgian beer. traditional talk by . then met for the Free Software Award, Although the beer is wonderful, many RMS gave his traditional speech, which was won by , and the do not drink and still go because this is including his Saint IGNUcius sketch, singing of the Free Software song. where you meet up others and get a where he blesses the crowd and indoc- Sunday started with streams on X and chance to chat about what everyone torates them in the Church of Emacs. Java. In the tutorial room, rather than thinks are the important developments. hour long talks, we were treated to sev- This chatting to like minded strangers, Talks enteen short fifteen minute talks. allows for the exchange of ideas and The lectures are split into streams to FOSDEM is unique amongst confer- should be encouraged. As everyone is allow more of a variety. Three full ences. It is organized by Raphael linked by Free and Open source soft- streams occurred alongside a host of Bauduin and his team. These are ware, you find that everyone wants to developer meetings. Anyone with an fans and although volunteers, they pro- talk to you. They want to tell you of interest can wander in and learn about duce a wonderfully organized event. some interesting development, gossip or the topic or help with the development. The talks vary. Some were very profes- technique and want to know what you This year we had eight developer sional, others are not quite so good. At do and your opinions on every subject. rooms including Debian, Tcl, KDE and FOSDEM, this can be an advantage. The Saturday evening is similar with Embedded Linux. A Hackers room was These speakers are the best in their field an organized buffet and a pub meet. This very popular with wireless networking. and you would otherwise miss these top- cross fertilization of ideas gives FOSDEM Saturday afternoon saw an Accessibil- ics. Some surprise, and give a real such a strong community feel. ity stream which included Braille and passion and enthusiasm to their subject. Speech output, Gnome Onscreen Key- An example of this was Dodji Seketeli Costs board and the KDE Accessibility Project. and his talk on the MlView project, an Due to the absence of major commercial- One of the most popular talks was in xml editor for GNOME environment. ization, FOSDEM only has a few the stream with Robert Later saw the security stream and the sponsors such as O’Reilly Books, scripting languages deal with Linux.com and Linux Magazine. Visitors SmartEiffel, Perl and Ruby. are encouraged to make a donation of 25 Tutorials covered accessibility Euros. This get you a Tee-shirt and those and Linux kernel. that donate more can get O’Reilly books, Everyone finally met up for entrance to the Saturday buffet meal and the closing talk by Jon “Mad- a chance to win subscriptions. ■ dog” Hall. Where crowd wept tears of joy. INFO Some community stands [1] Photos of Fosdem:http://fosdem.3ti.be/ are present and included [2] Main Fosdem site: Mozilla Europe, OpenBSD, http://www.fosdem.org/ who went out of their way to [3] Lecture slides portal:http://www.fosdem. be helpful and friendly and org/2004/index/news/ the FSF Europe with our Pres- [4] BudgetFosdem:http://wiki.gllug.org.uk/ Figure 1: FOSDEM 2004 was held at the Université Libre de ident Georg Greve available cgi-bin/moin.cgi/BudgetFosdem Bruxelles (ULB). for all to talk to.

84 May 2004 www.linux-magazine.com