[Fresco-devel] Report from FOSDEM 2003

Hi!

I got back from the FOSDEM in Brussels yesterday night. Here comes a short 
report:

The event is focused on free and open source software developers and features 
almost exclusively technical talks. In addition to the main tracks there was 
a so called "open track" which allowed for visitors to present their projects 
without much hassle after registering with the FOSDEM team. I was able to get 
Fresco into that track. In addition there were about 7 developer rooms for 
projects like Gnome, KDE, GNUstep, Mozilla, one for embedded linux projects, 
etc. plus a few boothes with the usual suspects: Debian, OpenBSD, the FSF 
Europe and O'Reilley. The show had about 1200 visitors most of which were in 
the target audience: You could really walk up to a visitor, ask what he is 
working on and he'd mention some project or another 9 out of 10 times...

Mourad, which graciously allowed me to stay at his place, and I tad a lot of 
interesting talks with the people there. The first day we only managed to 
show up to one presentation on freedesktops.org, a couple of volunteers 
basically trying to get X-applications from different backgrounds (like KDE 
or Gnome) to work together.The speaker did mention some "weirdo CORBA based, 
OpenGL rendering project" in passing (not giving a name to it) as not being 
needed. Everything could be fixed inside X. I was listening really well, but 
I couldn't find any point he mentioned that had forced me to update the 
slides for my presentation. So I guess he is wrong on that;-) Anyway, I 
talked to him later. I doubt he had seen the light after wards, but at least 
he said he'd watch his mouth the next time.

In the evening there was the Free software Award ceremony. See 
http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/press-release/2003q1/000050.html for the 
official press release on that.

The second day was equally interesting. The highlight was of course my 
presentation in the open track;.-) There were about 40 people there and the 
whole thing went very well, even though someone had removed the beamer during 
lunch break and it was not to be found again. Good luck and a not totally 
unfounded mistrust in computer systems in general (and openoffice in 
particular) had made me bring slides, so I was prepared. Unfortunately that 
ment I couldn't show the demos during the presentation. Instead I answered, 
with a little help from Mourad, questions and invited anybody interested to 
stay after the presentation so I could show the demos on my laptop. We didn't 
get any stupid questions at all, so I assume I brought my points over well 
enough. I guess about 20 people stayed to see the demos.

We received some very positive comments after the presentation, one guy 
actually said we were the bravest project he knew (referring to the flames we 
are bound to get with 'attacking' X), someone was amazed that we did not get 
any funding.  Someone said he hadn't seen such an impressive project yet, 
even though it definitely is unusable for normal work yet. Mourad and I were 
really euphoric after wards:-) So much so that we left the show without 
attending the last presentation we actually had wanted to see... everybody 
not in one of the presentations going on was already packing up and we just 
joined the crowed without really realizing it.

PS: Raph said he'd try to get us into one of the main tracks next time. He 
thinks about doing something on alternatives to X. I asked him to make sure 
PicoGUI gets invited too, I'd really like to meet Micah once:-)

-- 
Gruss,
Tobias

------------------------------------------------------------
Tobias Hunger           The box said: 'Windows 95 or better'
[email protected]                      So I installed Linux.
------------------------------------------------------------

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQA+R8tSv0FZW3NyoqURAoLmAJ4gWBrttCXbEp/A+MXwPB8o86DjbACeLKbL
hxM4mEPDZxmPUhRH+xqkLlY=
=q9qP
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----