Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

It has become a yearly tradition for people with strong opinions about certain aspects of the open source ecosystem to suggest very noisily that FOSDEM should share these strong opinions. I don't think I need to remind anyone about the excitement earlier this year regarding one of our sponsors.

This time, Martijn is upset that there will be a Mono developer room at FOSDEM 2010.

Martijn's reasoning seems to basically boil down to we don't need Mono. He doesn't mention who those "we" are though. Mono looks like a very active open source project. Clearly the people working on it feel that it is needed. Martijn seems to feel that the open source software they are producing is not worthy of being produced. By that reasoning, why is there a need for the Linux kernel? Aren't there enough open source operating systems already? The BSD projects have been around for decades. Why have Python and Lua? Perl has been around forever.

I'm sorry Martijn. It's not because you don't feel a certain open source project is necessary that everyone feels that way.

The FOSDEM organization solicits motivated requests from open source projects who feel they would benefit from a developer room. The algorithm for deciding which projects are allocated rooms does not take into account the fact that some people may selfishly feel a project is "unnecessary". Our concern is to get the maximum benefit to open source development from the limited space we have available.

FOSDEM is not interested in politics. We don't want to be a forum for people to tell other people that their work is unnecessary. Strong language about "battles", "victories", "defeats" and "allowing to sneak" should be left at home.

FOSDEM wants to be a productive environment for open source developers to collaborate on their projects. Whatever those projects may be.