My trip to FOSDEM 2004

Friday

Nine of us had planned to take the same train, and we gathered in the bar, mostly leaving Tim O'Reilly his entourage in peace. The beer was very frothy, leding to speculation on whether we could get on the front page of slashdot by sending in a photo of it and saying that we'd seen Linus' face in the froth. The train arrived exactly on time of course. Not having an EU passport I had to queue with the rest of the foreign scum, but luckily it was much shorter and I was able to get through the passport check faster than my travelling companions, though I was the only one to get warned that not having my passport stamped would result in 24 hours in prison.

We were met at the station by a few people who'd travelled overnight by bus, and some departed for their hotels. Once again there were nine of us, and when we found a ticket vending machine for the Metro which had a BSOD at least six took photos, all with digital cameras. The six of us who had booking at the youth hostel were joined by another, fortunatly they found a spare mattress so he didn't have to sleep on the floor. Each of us was given a card to open doors, but the system had a FIFO which only allowed six cards to operate for our room; we soon tired of sending someone down every few minutes to get his card enabled to that someone else would become the victim of this.

After dumping our bags and an unsuccessful attempt by some to find an off-licence it was time to head into town. We'd arranged to meet in the Grand Place (though perhaps this plan should have been more detailed). Six of us went from there to a restaurant, where we struggled to convince the staff of our need for about fourteen seats. Our numbers had grown a bit by the time we placed our first order (nine raspberry beers), and when I left there were 27 of us.

Off to the the pub, where the Fosdem organisers had booked a floor. There appeared to be a couple of non-geeks there; I suspect that they decided that it was a gay bar based on gender mix, but then realised that there was something wrong with our dress sense. We left a few hours later, after the public transport had finished. Walking back didn't take as long as I'd first feared, though some took a longer route in a futile quest for kebabs.

Saturday

Tim O'Reilly, "The Open Source Paradigm Shift"

• Larry Ellison of Oracle claims that while Open Source works well for OSes and web servers it won't work for hard things like databases. He is smoking something and has definetly inhaled
• Perl is like duct tape - its easy to put in and also easy to rip out so is great for code which will be changing frequently
• Larry Wall chose the camel for the Perl book because it is ugly but can go a long way without water
• most use windows but all use linux: almost everyone raised their hands when he asked who used linux (only 20% did when he asked the same question at Microsoft) but whenever he asks who uses google the response is always unanimous.
• the most successful websites rely on contributions from their users, eg amazon and, in a way, napster
• greater openness has led to more success for PC makers: IBM is overtaken by Compaq which loses to Dell. Is Debian to linux distributions what Dell is to PC makers?
• Mark Andresson of Netscape said "Windows is just a bag of drivers", underestimating how important that was
• MS happily admit that .net is an attempt to control how websites talk to each other and reduce the importance of the the APIs offered by google and amazon
• interoperability and data formats are more important than source code
• screen scraping predicted web services
• the internet is the greatest achievement of open source software

Richard M Stallman (RMS), "Free Software Foundation" (I've heard him say similar things before)

• if you are asked you for a copy of some software what is the lesser of two evils: to refuse to share with this person who has never done anything bad to you, or to break the licence of someone who has tried to stop you sharing with your neighbour?
• signing an NDA to see source code is an act of betraying your community
• freedom is under threat from the likes of the EUCD, patents, Treacherous Computing, Digital Restrictions Management
• emacs is an editor that became a way of life and then a religion
• membership of the church of emacs requires not using non-free software
• using vi is not a sin but a penance so long as it is a free version of vi
• disagrees with the first speaker, thinking that source code is more important than data

Robert Love, "Kernel & desktop"

• some cool stuff here: udev, HAL, D-BUS
• a lot of work yet to do, and "we're meant to have flying cars by now"

Jonathan Corbet, "Linux kernel: 2.6 internals"

• the previous lecture was crowded, but now not only are all 450 seats taken and people sitting in the aisles but there are more people crowding around the doors
• not much I didn't know here: better scalability and lower latency
• I knew that the big database and storage vendors we looking forward to 2.6 to be able to use more disks, one of the requests to be able to attach 4000 SCSI disks to a system, but I hadn't realised that each of those 4000 disks was meant to have 64 partitions

RMS gave a speech saying how KDE had started out as non-free and how important the work that led to that changing was, before saying that the recipient of the award was better known for his work on the kernel that is a critical part of the GNU operating system. Alan Cox wasn't there to receive it. Some joined in as he sang the Free Software Song while others of us cringed.

Wi-fi networks struggle with this many geeks armed with laptops and PDAs, and apparently using IP-over-DNS doesn't really help.

We bought beer and chocolate then had dinner. Those who'd made a sufficient donation to fosdem had gone off to a buffet, and many of the rest of us met in a bar. The horse in this bar was different to the one from the previous evening, being less stuffed and more like something from a merry-go-round. Arriving at this bar led to the question "Is this the right place?", and the rest of us bursting out laughing having seen an impressive array of geeks through the windows. The music sucked so a group of us left in search of somewhere better (the music getting better as we did so), and wandered for a long time before splitting into a couple of groups and finding more suitable bars.

Sunday

Tom Tromey, "GCJ"

• honest benchmarks - while GCJ is usually faster than Java he also showed where it wasn't
• code from Sun isn't needed, but access to the Technology Compatibility Kit and Java Community Process would be nice

Keith Packard, "XFree86"

• what x.org and freedesktop org do, and XFree86 did
• he wants half a GB of video ram
• mouse mapping is a bit broken using the code from his development tree. "I'll fix it sometime, maybe next week"
• too much code is duplicated, you know you're on the right track when the entry in the CVS log says "3000 lines deleted, extension added"
• wants X to be a GL app, so windows can be painted on any arbitrary surface
• XFree86 snuck in a licence change in September crediting David Dawes' company and now claim that the recent policy changes allowing such licences are to bring the policy in line with what actually happens
• x.org is restructuring to have more community involvement
• freedesktop.org hasn't really forked XFree86 as it is the one that has kept the old licence; "XFree86 were the last people we thought would ever fork XFree86"
• demonstration of various bits of eye candy

Dominique Colnet, "SmartEiffel"

• really about Eiffel the language rather than SmartEiffel the toolset that implements it
• impressed those who were unfamiliar with assertions

Henning Brauer, "OpenBSD"

• this was really about the BGP implementation that he is working on
• zebra is not really free, not being developed, and has error messages in Japanese or sometimes in a form of english that isn't much more use
• Cisco is overpriced, buggy, and has far too little processing power
• it takes 10s to load a full table on a Pentium III 1GHz, whereas a mid range Cisco takes 2-3 mins
• routing information for the whole internet takes 20MB
• an initial version is expected in OpenBSD 3.5, and it should be all fluffy for OpenBSD 3.6

Richard Kilmer, "Ruby"

• like Perl but object oriented
• regular expressions are objects
• there are classes for true and false

John "Maddog" Hall couldn't think of what to talk about so called his speech "Tales from the Crypt" and entertained us with anecdotes.

A few of us had dinner in the Shamrock Indian Restaurant. Based on the decor it was probably once an Irish pub which has since been taken over and become an Indian restuarant.

Monday

The guy checking my passport as I left confused me by asking how long I'd been in Europe (does Britain count? Is it a few days or a few years?). Arriving in back at Waterloo I was told that I have to fill in a landing card whenever I reenter Britain, which surprised me as I've crossed the channel several times in the last couple of years without filling in one of thse cards.

And finally I'm home - time to sleep.