Fosdem 2006.

For the first time in six years, I think, I drove to FOSDEM without taking any wrong turn or without even doubting which turn to take. That would be a good start, but alas, I arrived late for RMS's talk. Luckily I was in time for the [ GPLv3 discussion ] and I was glad that Richard summed up the list of changes to the GPL v2. They all sounded reasonable to me so I will have to wonder now why Linus does not want to release the linux kernel with it. Little time was left for a discussion though but it would appear some interesting problems were raised, to which Richard respondend "I don't know but I will think about that". Even gurus don't have all the answers ready.

This was just before lunch break and the smell of hot dogs was filling the auditorium, a rather unpleasant side effect of moving the bar to a new location just after the auditorium. After lunch I had planned to go to the talk about gnustep, but the gorm and core data part were not that interesting. The gorm part could have been more productive by just spelling out the differences between Interface Builder and Gorm instead of going over all the things you can do in Gorm that are just like you would do them in Interface Builder. Same goes for the Core Data part, at least in the beginning because I did not stay.

In the Mozilla devroom the atmosphere seemed to be that of victory. They are on a winning streak and want more market share and the discussion topic at hand was "how do we go about that?". It will remain strange to me that free software developers would want to fight battles over things like market share. I remember the days when coding was for fun, but now the sweet smell of success seems to taste for more. Not that I don't support the idea of going for world domination, it just seems to me that developers should develop and marketeers should market the product. This time around, I arrived at the Free Software Marketing Meeting at which geeks would start marketing. No suits required here. Leaves to be said: very interesting discussion. I am very interested in marketing and trying to gain market share with limited resources will be an interesting development to watch. I would not support the effort though, since I am convinced that in the end your better product will win anyway. I, personally, don't know anyone that would want to switch back to Internet Explorer. Even with IE7, I don't see that changing. Let developers develop and trust to it that the popularity will continue to grow with every ounce of quality FireFox gains.

The fun in development is cleary shifting to different products in the Mozilla camp. The Polish Flock-developer was clear about that: flock is for fun. I remember hearing this from mozilla developers years ago and it worked for them, so my hopes are high for the Flock project. The idea is to just rethink the whole of the user interface of what a browser should be in the new era where the consumers of the web are also often the producers. Now there is a good idea, and even though the practical consequences of a theoretic goal like that are to be filled in, I would not be surprised if this became a great product. No timeline for a finished product, it is too soon to tell! That's how we change the world, sir. I like it.

The fun in development was certainly not shifting to the seamonkey project juding from the enthousiasm of the presentation after that. It was rather dull. The main victory seemed to be that they were still alive and when the guy arrived to the future plans nothing very impressive seemed to be on the list. "Whatever gecko will give us by then" just doesn't sound very appealing to me.

On sunday I arrived on time. I really wanted to see the darcs-presentation since I have become a darcs-user these days. I was reminded of the more esoteric languages I struggled through at university when the guy was going over the main principles of darcs illustrated by Haskell-code. I could understand some of it, but as a user this was really over my head so I lost my concentration after a while.

Then there was subversion, which is the second of the three version control systems I use on a regular basis. Subversion is my favourite one and going over everything you can do with subversion refreshed my mind on why it is my favourite one. Good talk.

Switching tracks now, because in the Janson-room a talk about DoJo was going on while the room started smelling of hamburgers again. The developer took us through some javascript coding paradigms that can be used and are used with DoJo which was unexpected but interesting anyway. There is obviously more to javascript than I would have imagined.

During lunch break I took a look at the program but having had a very busy weekend not just with fosdem and not seeing much that could not be missed (except for the closing talk maybe) I thought it was time for me to call it quits and trundled back using a new experimental route. Going home I took some wrong turns after all...

Next year I hope to be back in full force!

My reviews through the years:
[ fosdem 2005 ]
[ fosdem 2004 ]