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After FOSDEM 2016

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Planet Debian Planet FSFE Free Software Travel
This blog post is more than two years old. It is preserved here in the hope that it is useful to someone, but please be aware that links may be broken and that opinions expressed here may not reflect my current views. If this is a technical article, it may no longer reflect current best practice.

FOSDEM was fun. It was great to see all these open source projects coming together in one place and it was really good to talk to people that were just as enthusiastic about the FOSS activities they do as I am about mine.

Thanks go to Saúl Corretgé who looked after the real-time communications dev room and made sure everything ran smoothly. I was very pleased to find that I had to stand for a couple of talks as the room was full with people eager to learn more about the world of RTC.

I was again pleased on the Sunday when I had such a great audience for my talk in the distributions dev room. Everyone was very welcoming and after the talk I had some corridor discussions with a few people that were really interesting and have given me a few new things to explore in the near future.

A few highlights from FOSDEM:

  • ReactOS: Since I last looked at this project it has really matured and is getting to be rather stable. It may be possible to start seriously considering replacing Windows XP/Vista machines with ReactOS where the applications being run just cannot be used with later versions of Windows.
  • Haiku: I used BeOS a long long time ago on my video/music PC. I can’t say that I was using it over a Linux or BSD distribution for any particular reason but it worked well. I saw a talk that discussed how Haiku was keeping up-to-date with drivers and also there was a talk, that I didn’t see, that talked about the new Haiku package management system. I think I may check out Haiku again in the near future, even if only for the sake of nostalgia.
  • Kolab: Continuing with the theme of things that have matured since I last looked at them, I visited the Kolab stand at FOSDEM and I was impressed with how far it has come. In fact, I was so impressed that I’m looking at using it for my primary email and calendaring in the near future.
  • picoTCP: When I did my Honours project at University, I was playing with Contiki. This looks a lot easier to get started with, even if it’s perhaps missing parts of the stack that Contiki implements well. If I ever find time for doing some IoT hacking, this will be on the list of things to try out first.

This is just some of the highlights, and I know I’m missing out a lot here. One of the main things that FOSDEM has done for me is open my eyes as to how wide and diverse our community is and it has served as a reminder that there is tons of cool stuff out there if you take a moment to look around.

Also, thanks to my trip to FOSDEM, I now have four new t-shirts to add into the rotation: FOSDEM 2016, Debian, XMPP and twiki.org.

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