FOSDEM 2018 - recap

FOSDEM 2018 - recap #

Too crowded, too many queues, too little space - but also lots of friendly people, Belgian waffles, ice cream, an ASF dinner with grey beards and new people, a busy ASF booth, bumping into friends every few steps, meeting humans you see only online for an entire year or more: For me, that’s the gist of this year’s FOSDEM.

Note: German version of the article including images appeared in my employer’s tech blog.

To my knowledge FOSDEM is the biggest gathering of free software people in Europe at least. It’s free of charge, kindly hosted by ULB, organised by a large group of volunteers. Every year early February the FOSS community meets for two one weekend in Brussels to discuss all sorts of aspects of Free and Open Source Software Development - including community, legal, business and policy aspects. The event features more than 600 talks as well as several dozen booths by FOSS projects and FOSS friendly companies. There’s several FOSDEM fringe events surrounding the event that are not located on campus. If you go to any random bar or restaurant in Brussels that weekend you are bound to bump into FOSDEM people.

Fortunately for those not lucky enough to have made it to the event, video recordings (unfortunately in varying quality) are available online at video.fosdem.org. Some highlights you might want to watch:

Exploiting modern microarchitectures - Meltdown, Spectre, and other hardware attacks by Jon Masters in case you want to understand what the Meltdown and Spectre and the underlying causes really mean for computer security.
Passing the Baton: Succession Planning for FOSS leadership by VM (Vicky) Brasseur on why you should build hand over into your open source project before it's too late including some hints on how to best do that.
Too young to Rock'n'Roll by Dominik George and Niels Hradek on what legal hurdles minors encounter when trying to contribute to open source projects.
State of OpenJDK by Mark Reinhold if you're interested in the state of OpenJDK, both in terms of community as well as in terms of technical challenges ahead.

One highlight for me personally this year: I cannot help but believe that I met way more faces from The Apache Software Foundation than at any other FOSDEM before. The booth was crowded at all times - Sharan Foga did a great job explaining The ASF to people. Also it’s great to hear The ASF mentioned in several talks as one of the initiatives to look at to understand how to run open source projects in a sustainable fashion with an eye on longevity. It was helpful to have at least two current Apache board members (Bertrand Delacretaz as well as Rich Bowen) on site to help answer tricky questions. Last but not least it was lovely meeting several of the Apache Grey Beards (TM) for an Apache Dinner on Saturday evening. Luckily co-located with the FOSDEM HPC speaker dinner - which took a calendar conflict out of the Apache HPC people’s calendar :)

Me personally, I hope to see many more ASF people later this year in Berlin for FOSS Backstage - the advertisement sign that was located at the FOSDEM ASF booth last weekend already made it here, will you follow?