Hi,
The purpose of this e-mail is to invite you to attend the 5th edition of FOSDEM. This edition will take place on the 26th and 27th of February 2005 in Brussels (see http://www.fosdem.org for more info). The previous edition encountered a huge success with more than 2000 developers coming from all over the world to attend the talks of famous figures of the Free Software and Open Source community.
This year, will be present (in alphabetical order):
Alan Cox - Kernel Maintainer Alan Robertson - Linux High-Availability Project Founder Alasdair Kergon - Device Mapper and LVM Maintainer Alex Larsson - Nautilus and GNOME-VFS Maintainer Alexander Dymo - KDevelop Maintainer Andreas Zeller - Creator of ddd Benoit Minisini - Creator of Gambas Ethan Galstad - Creator of Nagios Gerald Combs - Creator of Ethereal Harald Fernengel - KDevelop Developer Harald Welte - Netfilter Core Team Member, GPL Enforcement Jeff Johnson - RPM Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales - Wikipedia Founder Ken Preslan - Developer of OpenGFS Marius Mauch - Gentoo Emerge Marty Roesch - Creator of Snort IDS Matthias Ettrich - Creator of KDE, and Lyx Olivier Fourdan - Creator of XFCE Olle Mulmo - GRID Specialist, Globus Toolkit Core Team Pat Mochel - Sysfs/Kernel Driver Core Maintainer Richard M. Stallman - Leader of the FSF Stuart Winter - Slackware & slacktrack Developer
And many others who will be giving talks and tutorials...
Several Free or Open Source Software projects have decided to hold a meeting during FOSDEM. It is a great occasion to meet core developers in the following developers' rooms: Calibre room, GNU Classpath room, Clustering room, Debian room, Dokeos room, Drupal room, Embedded Software room, Gentoo room, GNOME room, GNUStep room, Jabber room, KDE room, Mozilla room, Opengroupware room, Perl room, PHP/Pear room, Tcl room. All those rooms have an internal schedule, including talks and presentations from lead developers.
Moreover, the Free Software Award will be handed out during the FOSDEM 2005 by Richard Stallman and other members from the Free Software Foundation.
Don't miss other FOSDEM initiatives like the Lightning Talks, the Key Signing Party, or the buffet.
FOSDEM's goal is to provide Free Software and Open Source developers and communities the opportunity to learn and discuss the latest developments in the Free and Open Source arena and to promote the development and the benefits of Free and Open Source solutions.
The speakers mainly talk about technologies and make technical speeches.
The event is totally free.
This is a non-commercial event organised by people from the community. So we would like to thank our sponsors who have understood this and helped us making FOSDEM possible to happen this year again in the same spirit. Those include: O'Reilly Media inc., Linux Magazine, Freshmeat, Sourceforge, Argon7, Astaro, GNU/Linux Magazine France, Hakin9, Misc, PePLink, X-Tend, LinuxFR, Linux-Magazin, Best Of Publishing and all of our donators without who organizing such an event wouldn't be possible.
We encourage you to support FOSDEM if you appreciate the event and want it to continue in the same spirit. More information about the FOSDEM 2005 support operation at: http://www.fosdem.org/2005/index/support/
We hope to see you there.
--
FOSDEM 2005 Damien Sandras Community Contact
The previous edition encountered a huge success with more than 2000 developers coming from all over the world to attend the talks of famous figures of the Free Software and Open Source community.
Like hell I did. I can't speak for the other more than 1999 developers, but I went to meet some other developers who work on the same projects. All this cult of the celebrity nonsense sucks and this year, we can marvel at no talks about debian in the packaging tools thread, no talks about GNUstep in the desktop thread, no mainstream speakers from FSFE and so on. I'm giving it a miss and hoping FOSDEM gets back to focusing on developers next year. pr@fosdem bounced earlier today.
If we had a developers meeting in East Anglia, could we get the abbreviation to be EADAM somehow? That's funny two ways.
MJ Ray mjr@dsl.pipex.com wrote:
Like hell I did. I can't speak for the other more than 1999 developers, but I went to meet some other developers who work on the same projects. All this cult of the celebrity nonsense sucks and this year, we can marvel at no talks about debian in the packaging tools thread, no talks about GNUstep in the desktop thread, no mainstream speakers from FSFE and so on. I'm giving it a miss and hoping FOSDEM gets back to focusing on developers next year. pr@fosdem bounced earlier today.
Can we assume that you're having a bad day? I don't think having no talks about GNUstep is a particularly bad idea, all in all, just how many GNUsteppers are out there, and just how many GNUstep developers compared to, say, the likes of Gnome... Until GNUstep gets a larger following, it's not entirely likely to get much coverage, really, is it... So, the way to fix that is to make a decent window mangler for it, fix the holes where apps don't exist, and then make it as 'pretty' and annoying as MacOS X... then market it to people that want to use Mac OS X but can't afford the extorsionate prices for the software or hardware, and only really want a decent word processor and web browser.
On the rest of it, hrm, there seem to be a fair chunk of #debian-uk people going to FOSDEM, so it can't be as bad as you're making out... either that, or they're all going for a weekend of socialising, which is possible, and probably more profitable in the search for knowledge than any pre-prepared speech.
There's bound to be something that I've missed, but hey, I'm tired.
If we had a developers meeting in East Anglia, could we get the abbreviation to be EADAM somehow? That's funny two ways.
That's an easy one to get to...
East Anglian Developers Annual Meeting... or East Anglian Developers Abandon Meeting (in favour of pub)... or East Anglian Developers Access Meeting, or, well, there's probably thousands more, but I'm tired and cba.
Cheers,
Brett asked:
Can we assume that you're having a bad day?
Hell yeah!
I think a lot of people going to FOSDEM are just going through the motions. The reports coming back so far have been mostly about fringe things: I've only seen one person whose stuff I read often mentioning a mainstream talk, so far.
I like the idea of making a good GNUstep window manager. Can you subscribe me to your mailing list please? ;-)
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MJ Ray mjr@dsl.pipex.com wrote:
Brett asked:
Can we assume that you're having a bad day?
Hell yeah!
I think a lot of people going to FOSDEM are just going through the motions. The reports coming back so far have been mostly about fringe things: I've only seen one person whose stuff I read often mentioning a mainstream talk, so far.
I think a lot of them where basically going for the socialising, and of course, there was a "debian" room, apparently. Maybe they went for that ;)
I like the idea of making a good GNUstep window manager. Can you subscribe me to your mailing list please? ;-)
It's a nice idea, I might even play again when I get back my sick C head, well, sorry, my sick X head. X programming really sucketh ;)
Of course, there's no such *thing* as a good window manager though, there's only one that will fit the needs of the exact moment that you start writing it. Needs change, as do users (gits!).
And hey, I'm *on* *YOUR* mailing list for the window mangling thangs ;)
Cheers, - -- Brett Parker web: http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/ email: iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk
On Mon, Feb 28, 2005 at 02:57:23PM +0000, Brett Parker wrote:
MJ Ray mjr@dsl.pipex.com wrote:
Brett asked:
Can we assume that you're having a bad day?
Hell yeah!
I think a lot of people going to FOSDEM are just going through the motions. The reports coming back so far have been mostly about fringe things: I've only seen one person whose stuff I read often mentioning a mainstream talk, so far.
I think a lot of them where basically going for the socialising, and of course, there was a "debian" room, apparently. Maybe they went for that ;)
The thing that surprised me about FOSDEM (this year was the first time I'd been) was just how big it was. I was expecting a couple of hundred people or so, and one estimate of the actual number I heard was more like 5000.
I think at peak times there were probably in the region of 10 different talks taking place at any point in time; I knew the Debian dev room had a large number of talks and there was also quite a good embedded development room - hearing Wookey talk about the Netbook project was very interesting, for example.
I don't think the dev room talks really count as just "fringe" talks. It's probably a very good opportunity for a lot of projects to actually meet face to face, so their dev rooms are more useful than being at the talks listed on the main schedule.
And yes, there was a fair degree of socialising. ;)
J.
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Brett Parker -
Fosdem Organization -
Jonathan McDowell -
MJ Ray