Updated: Never — Philip's Blog

This year, FOSDEM didn't completely kill me like last year. Cleanup still turned me into a living corpse (despite the availability of Club Mate -- thanks to the Hackerspace Brussels crowd) but at least I'm back among the living a day after the event instead of a week.

I was very impressed with the network this year. Thanks to AY, Jerome and Peter from Cisco, and of course the FOSDEM networking team. We had to tell people to use more bandwidth. People even came to the infodesk asking us when the network would break because it didn't feel like FOSDEM to them. Yeah...

Taking it a little bit easier over the weekend, I was able to keep an eye on the noise on IRC. This little graph is highly amusing:

Back to work today. Very few days remain in my current contract, but that doesn't mean the work doesn't need finishing. :-)

Of course there will be a Friday Beer Event at FOSDEM this year. Only this year, it won't be me organizing it. I felt it was time to do something different and it looks like Jochen has a very firm grip on things. I'm looking forward to attending the beer event as a participant.

What to do with the so-called free time now though?

It seems I've inherited the keysigning bits.

Setting up a very basic key submission server required a mere couple of hours of remembering why Perl is a write-only language. The results of that exercise can be admired at http://ksp.fosdem.org/kspd.pl.txt. Announcing the existence of this service to the world was rather more involved.

The ordeal reminded me -- again -- of primitive cavemen.

Every time someone wanted to paint a woolly mammoth on a cave wall, they'd have to draw it from scratch, either with reference to a previous drawing, or from memory. It was impossible to reuse previous mammoths.

One glorious day, a bright caveman discovered that certain rocks can be rubbed against thin sheets of skin to leave an impression, and the impression can then be used to draw new woolly mammoths. Even more (haha) impressive was that the impression could be used to make a new, slightly modified (longer tusks, who knows?) mammoth-template. Previous impressions could be saved for future generations, to teach them what woolly mammoth looked like in grandpa Thag's youth.

And thus version control was born.

Fast-forward many centuries. People no longer live in caves. Mammoths are now stored in "the cloud". Someone comes up with the wonderful idea of "content management".

One day, someone creates a mammoth and pastes it on the proverbial cave wall. A couple of days later, the mammoth needs changing a bit. In these modern days of the cloud, where mammoths fit in 140 characters or less, this can now be accomplished without going through the pesky process of archiving previous mammoths. Of course, the cave wall could be "configured" to keep old mammoths around, but why bother? In ten minutes time, there will be a new mammoth, and no one could possibly care about the previous one.

And thus version control died.

And mammoths are drawn from scratch again.

As technology advances, humans regress to compensate.

The keysigning announcement is now online. Being the caveman I am, I've also put it in a version control system, far away from any clouds. Just on the off chance that it may come in handy. You know, in a year or so?

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.

Despite leaving early yesterday because I was really feeling too ill to continue (thanks for the ride, Zombie!) I appear to have survived another FOSDEM.

Thanks everyone for showing up and thanks to the team for ensuring that FOSDEM still works if people get ill and have to go home early!

I'm now looking forward to the post-mortem session with the team and various post-mortem sessions with suppliers. While many things went right this year, a number of things need improvement too.

So it turns out I didn't have anything to worry about: boatloads of people showed up to FOSDEM and the beer event again. I am completely dead though. This morning, Jan-Frederik collected me at very dark o'clock after the first six hours of sleep I've had in a very long time.

Today, I discovered a new "task" for FOSDEM though: grizzly duty. I've found some marginally comfortable chairs just outside the cloak room and I am pretending to be a grizzly guarding it by snoring loudly.

Slowly, I'm starting to wake up so I can do more useful things again.

Why do we do this to ourselves every year?

I think probably every conference organizer knows what I'm talking about... what if nobody shows up?, what if we're all alone?, how unbelievably stupid will we feel tomorrow after months of organizing and nobody will be there?

FOSDEM Beer Event this evening! We start around 17:00ish/18:00ish. Bar stays open most of the night. FOSDEM tomorrow starts at 10:00.

Be there! We don't want to be alone. :-)

A bit late to the game, but moving fast. I announced this year's Beer Distribution Algorithm (v3.1 now) to the world last night:

http://fosdem.org/2009/beeralgorithm

The major improvement this year of course is the addition of Free Beer (in moderation) sponsored by Google. I'm still not entirely sure how I'm going to ensure fair distribution of this Free Beer throughout the evening, but I'm confident that it will work out well enough. Most of the ideas (and suggestions) I've had, would basically amount to "free beer for early birds" and I'd like a bit wider of a distribution.

I look forward to seeing everyone there on Friday!

Is this really necessary? :-)

It appears that the organization of FOSDEM 2009 is firmly on track. The schedule has been posted and we're now sorting out logistics and other last minute details.

The good thing about organizing a conference of this size for the ninth (!) time is that many (dare I say most?) dragons likely to be encountered have already been dealt with in the past so we know how to handle them.

Nevertheless, there are always new surprises every year. It doesn't help that I'm feeling a little under the weather this week...

As usual, things will work out.

Today I was pointed to this fascinating (delusional) "appeal" by a bunch of people who seem to have an axe to grind with Novell:

http://static.1407.org/20090105-fosdem-2009-appeal.html

The simple response is this: FOSDEM will not lend itself to anyone's political agenda either by accepting or refusing sponsorship or donations.

A more thorough answer follows. Some of the views I express may not be shared by the entire FOSDEM team, though it would not surprise me at all if some of them agree wholeheartedly.

FOSDEM is a technical conference for open source software developers. It is not a political conference for free software activists. Since a fair number of free software activists also happen to be open source software developers, there are a number of free software people and projects at FOSDEM too. There is even an FSF Europe stand every year and we even let Richard Stallman give a keynote a number of times.

Aside: few people remember that the "F" in FOSDEM is a token gesture to the free software movement -- in the beginning, there was OSDEM. I will not go into the details of that here.

At heart however, despite all the free software stuff going on, FOSDEM remains a technical conference, not a political one.

We honestly don't care about the politics of companies who give us money. If they are technically involved in the development of open source software, we are happy to relieve them of any excess cash they happen to have lying about. Our business is organizing one of the best and largest open source development conferences in Europe. Our business is software, not politics. We determine our budget based on what we need, not on who we want to take money from.

Having said that, please donate to FOSDEM. While corporate sponsorship provides the bulk of our budget, we do need individual donations too. There will be tshirts again! We have more varied sizes this year and the artwork is the nicest to date in my opinion. There will also be the usual donations return system with gadgets, books and magazine subscriptions to win.

Novell has been a valued sponsor of FOSDEM for a number of years and we are very grateful for their contributions. Their business model or politics is none of our business. What matters to us is that they are also in the open source software business and want to give us money.

While we could possibly conceivably organize FOSDEM without corporate sponsorship, it would not be the same. A conference just is not "complete' without corporate schwag and presence. We are very grateful to all our corporate sponsors.

If O'Reilly publishes a book from an author you don't like, will you have us refuse their sponsorship too? Or any of our other sponsors?

Will conspiracy theories run wild if I mention that we also have a non-zero number of sponsors who do not want to be listed publically? We would love to thank them profusely too. They know who they are.