Arrived in Bonn / St. Augustin yesterday, where on Saturday morning FrOSCon
kicked off. This is the second time the local user group organises this conference and I must
say that this is certainly one of the most relaxed conferences I’ve ever been to. Highlights include good
drinks to keep you running (Go Mate!), couches,
wifi available already before the conference started,
good beer and a lot of nice gimmicks such as the bouncy castle. The atmosphere is very friendly, quite
some KDE-related peeps here, especially Amarok and KDE friendly projects such as Kubuntu, Sidux, Skolelinux
FreeBSD and inevitable the FSFE. The conference is quite a bit more busy than it was last year, and last
one of the gods that make the weather decided to put up sunny, not to hot and above all dry skies on top
of this conference. During my idle time, I talked a bit with Olaf about using Javascript in website and how
this can be done in a way so it’s accessible for everyone. I’ll probably work a bit on websites during this
weekend to make it so. Talk is cheap.
I’m glad to announce that both failed none of our tests, so we were rather safe for saturday night — same exercise.
photos. My talk on Saturday about KDE4 went really
well, a double lecture hall packed with people
(probably the biggest one here), the organising team’s estimate is 400-450 people attending this talk, I was able to
go through most of the new frameworks (“pillars”), such as Solid, Phonon, Plasma, Oxygen et al, talk a bit about
our community, demo what’s currently there and finally answer quite some interested questions. People were really
positive of how far we’ve come with KDE so far, and there’s lots of people waiting eagerly for KDE4 while most
seem to understand that stable and cool software doesn’t develop itself. I’ve talked to quite some people and it’s
amazing how our stuff gets people to think. I’ve heard the questions “do you think it would be possible to implement
[insert amazing idea here] with that?”, the answer has more than once been “Yes, in fact, I think it’s quite easy
because that’s what the frameworks are made for” — workflow improvement ideas are quite popular. This is to me a
good indication that we’re underway very well, and that we’re poking into people’s imagination. This morning, I had another talk scheduled, “CodeYard – bringing Free Software development into Highschools”. While
the audience was much smaller, the audience was interested in what we’re doing and received the talk really well.
After that, I took advantage of Torsten showing up here in St Augustin presenting Marble, then sat down at a couch
in the Chiilout area, mainly to finish this blogentry and upload photo’s. That didn’t happen until two hours later.
Turned out there’s a Canadian sitting next to me, named Zak Greant. I knew his name from the FLOSS foundations
list, he’s a staff member of the Mozilla Foundation. We talked about topics such as Free Software adoption (no
really!) sneakers, college drop-outs (see my crack dealer
blogentry) and generally had a relaxed time.
Zak shared some interesting insight in how the Mozilla Foundation works, and how it’s related to the Mozilla
Corporation and how he sees the software ecosphere developing after becoming mainstream. We also chatted a bit about
business ethics. I seem to have this strange talent to always pick the one Canadian out of the masses, good thing
they’re generally enjoyable folks. :-)