After Apache Con I spent a few days in Lisbon for Codebits. The conference is not developers-only. It is more of a mixture of hacking event, conference, exhibition. Though the location was not optimal for giving presentations (large exhibition hall with now a rather noisy presentation area) the whole event brought quite an interesting mixture of people together in one place in the capital of Portugal.
I had been to Portugal earlier this year, however that was just for recreating and vacation. So this time around I was quite happy to get the chance of seeing some part of the local culture that otherwise I would probably never have gotten access to. Having some loose ties to the Berlin hackers community, to the free software people in Europe but also to pragmatic open source developers what was most astonishing to me was to see the comparably huge amount of systems running Microsoft Windows used by codebits attendees. Talking a bit with locals it seemed like using free software for development is not all that unusual in Portugal, however people tend to wait for problems getting fixed instead of getting involved and actively contributing back.
