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. ...
FOSDEM 2014 # By now FOSDEM turned into some kind of tradition in our family: Since 2007 every year in February we are travelling to that one comfy B&B in Brussels for a weekend - not to take a closer look at the city but to attend (together with thousands of other geeks and open source hackers) one of the biggest conferences on all things open source. I love the conference concept for scaling: As it happens on a university campus they only have a limited number of huge rooms, but a fairly large number of mid-sized and small rooms. ...
Keepers of secrets - FOSDEM 09 # The closing keynote was given by Leslie Hawthorn whom I had the pleasure of meeting last year during Berlin Buzzwords. In her talk she shared insights into a topic commonly encountered in open source leadership that is way less often talked about than should be the case: Being in the role of a community leader people will talk to you about all sorts of confidential information and ask you to not share that information with other no matter how beneficial that might be for both parties. ...
On making Libre Office suck less – a major refactoring effort - FOSDEM 08 # Libre Office is currently in a phase of code cleanup and refactoring that turns the whole code base upside down. What that means is that people need tooling to avoid quality from going down and allow for new features going in without too much risk. The project made good experiences with using gerrit for code review of patches, tinderbox for fast integration testing, strict whitespace checks to avoid unintended mistakes, use clang compiler plugins. ...
E17 - FOSDEM 07 # I’m really glad the NoSQL room was all packed on afternoon – otherwise I’d have missed an amazing talk by people behind Enlightenment – a window manager that is older than Gnome, nearly older than KDE and has been my favourite choice for years and years (simply because they have sensible default configuration options: focus follows mouse, virtual desktops that allow for desktop switching when moving the mouse close to the screen edges, menu opening when clicking anywhere on the desktop background, options for remembering window placement and configuration on re-boot etc). ...
Systemd - FOSDEM 06 # As sort of a “go out of your comfort zone and discover new stuff” exercise I went to the systemd – two years later talk next. It’s just plain amazing to see a machine boot in roughly one second (that is not counting the 7s that the BIOS needs for initialization). The whole project started as a init-only project but has since grown to a much larger purpose: An init platform ranging from mobile, embedded, desktop devices to servers many features were just over-due across the board. ...
Notes on storage options - FOSDEM 05 # On MySQL Second day at FOSDEM for me started with the MySQL dev room. One thing that made me smile was in the MySQL new features talk: The speaker announced support for “NoSQL interfaces” to MySQL. That is kind of fun in two dimensions: A) What he really means is support for the memcached interface. Given the vast number of different interfaces to databases today, announcing anything as “supports NoSQL interfaces” sounds kind of silly. ...
AFERO GPL Panel discussion - FOSDEM 04 # The panel started with a bit of history of the AGPL: Born in the age of growing ASP (application service provider) businesses AGPL tried to fix the hosting loop whole in GPL in the early 2000s. More than ten years later it turns out the license hasn’t quite caught traction: On the one hand the license does have a few wording issues. ...
Mozilla legal issues - FOSDEM 03 # In the next talk Gervase Markham talked about his experience working for Mozilla on legal and license questions. First the speaker summarized what kind of requests he gets most: There are lots of technical support requests. Next on the top list is the question for whether or not shipping Mozilla with a set of modifications is ok. Next is an internal question, namely: Can I use this code? ...
Trademarks and OSS - FOSDEM 02 # So the first talk I went to ended up being in the legal dev room on trademarks in open source projects. The speaker had a background mainly in US American trademark law and quite some background when it comes to open source licenses. To start Pamela first showed a graphic detailing the various types of trademarks: In the pool of generic names there is a large group of trademarks that are in use but not registered. ...