Fosdem 2004 Review.

So much for day one. I am writing this while waiting on the FSF award just coming back of an overly boring talk by mr. Reiser on ReiserFS 4. He got so much lost in technical details on the system, that I don't really know if anyone could still follow at the end of the talk. Sorry, but I couldn't.

It's at talks like his that I doubt the fact if I am truly one of the guys that this meeting targets at. After all, I'm not an open source or free software developer. I sympathise, and show interest, that's all. I have a computer science degree, but if this guy is rambling on about B-trees and B+-trees, I can't help but think something like: yep, I remember those, what were they again? And then he goes on about dancing trees instead of balanced trees, and I'm lost. I mean, the most interesting thing I got from his talk is that he might support compressed filesystems again, and might even get a performance gain of it. Now, that's impressive, but it should not take an hour to get to that point.

To be honest, I must say I was in a bad state to pay attention. I have had a tiring week and I had been driving all over Brussels just to get on time for Mr. O'Reilly's talk but still missed it partly. Hell, what's wrong with me? I have been there before, but still each time I seem to find new ways of missing the campus. I'm amazing! Mr. O'Reilly was so kind to educate us on paradigm shifts that the Free&Open Source movement caused. It was pretty interesting, good viewpoints, well spoken for. I liked it.

Then came ever boombastic R.M.S. It's been the fourth time I've seen this guy, and he's rambling. To be short, he's really rambling. OK, he makes valid points, but it's really like preaching to the choir. So, I should have skipped RMS. Gotta write that down for next year.

It seems Macs have become increasingly popular I can't help but noticing. Ah well, they're sexy toys, I am typing on one myself, and I carry one in my bag. Of course I am too shy to open it and when I try to start writing this review, suddenly one of the chicks comes and sits next to me and all of a sudden I'm stuck with words. Damn me, why do I buy sexy toys instead of anonymous ones? There did not used to be chicks on a developer meeting, what is happening to this world? Next thing you know geeks will start making love instead of code and the free software war will be over, that will end RMS's empire. Ok, on for a sandwich, cheese only, being veggie and all.

After lunch we start of with the very interesting talk of Mr. Love about the love he is encouraging between kernel hackers and the desktop folks. Very interesting talk, very valid points. This room seems to be overcrowded, is fosdem getting too popular? Between the two talks people are shouting with a real german accent "please open window!", it sounds like they would suffocate if it wasn't to be opened. But only one opens, which is enough to get on my allergies, so I have a hard time keeping awake during the talk of the changes in the 2.6 kernel. Again way too many people, and the talk was again too technical for me, but I think I got the better part of it.

The day ended by the ceremony of giving the free software award to Alan Cox but he could not be present, so the reception speech was given by some Frenchman whom nobody could really understand and who kept the speech suspiciously short. It sounded like a recycled speech, more or less, quite a contrast from last year's experience where Mr. Lessig gave a very inspiring talk. And RMS had to give us another embarrassing moment in which he sang the free software song so I excercised my freedom not to sing along. Conclusion: interesting first day, gotta get up for the second one tomorrow, so sleep well.

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Miracle, on day 2: I did not take any wrong turn while driving to the campus, and I found a parking spot at very close distance. So, I was right on time, but still in doubt on whether to go for the lightning talk about libconf or go for the Fresco talk. Since the lightning talks were as far as I know a new idea of the fosdem crew I thought it would be worth checking out. And it was, albeit more because of rife than because of libconf. Rife introduced me to the concept of Web Continuation, which is a really neat idea. Libconf was a bit of a disappointment, since the talker wasn't too good a communicator.

Many of the talks suffer from this pain, but it's hard to blame that on someone, not everyone is born with excellent communicative skills. On to the interesting talk of gcj, and then to the excellent talk of XFree86. Now there was a guy that knows how to communicate. Funny, fluently and interesting, everything a good presentation should be like. And some nice demos of where XFree might be going, with more eye-candy like OS X. Excellent talk.

The queue for food is way too long, so while everybody is waiting I decide to go for some quick lightning talks, which turns out to be a good decision. After two lightning talks I get back and find that the queue has gone, and I can have a quick sandwich before going to the session about Cryptonit. And I thought the guy from libconf to be a bad communicator! The Englishman in front of me got so annoyed by this talker he started mumbling loudly and in the end left the room frustrated. That's a pity, because it seems like a nice program. I might check it out once.

Then comes a talk about OpenBSD, but it is about some border gate routing protocol or something like that which is way to detailed for me, and I decide to go for the perl talk. That turns out to be interesting, but not too spectacular. I did not learn many new things here, it was more like an overview of where perl came from and where it is going too, but I more or less knew everything already since I read one of the state of the onions of Larry Wall. On to the last talk about kernel objects by Jonathan Corbet, and I guess that was interesting, but I fell asleep. Sorry for that, combination of tiredness and allergies.

No chance of falling asleep during Maddog's finishing talk however. This guy is a real revelation to me. I did not know him beforehand, and it was really nice to see a man who's been around talk about his professional career in the way he did. The sense of humour this man shows! The experience he has! The way he puts things into perspective historically as well as politically! And then he ends with an emotional note, "Thanks for the memories!", which makes a softy like me almost want to cry. This guy got a standing ovation and he deserved it for this talk alone. Well he made my day. He made my fosdem 2004.

So, it was another good year. I am getting used to this event being in the neighbourhood, so I would really miss it if it was discontinued for some reason or other. Therefore: keep up the good work, fosdem crew! And thanks, thanks for the memories!