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Fosdem 2007

Organisation

Like last year, I did not help Pascal to manage the devrooms. I'd like to be more helpfull so as a lot of people I made a little donation and get a FOSDEM2007 t-shirt. The event was even better than last year (even if I think it's also cool last year except the wifi was not working last year).

This is the first time since 2004 that I don't meet Wouter! I hope we'll meet next Debian or FOSDEM meeting.

Women

Is it me or are there more and more women involved in open source? This is one of the great news form this year.

Famous People

This is the most famous picture I have since I played with Bjorn Borg when I was 10:

De 2007-02-fosdem

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From foreground to background: Me, Tom Tromey (GCJ, Fedora, autotools, etc etc etc), Simon Phipps (Mister Open Source at Sun Microsystems). (Thanks to Stephane Meslin-Weber for taking the picture (and others). (You can't see them on the picture but there were DevJammers all around!)

OpenJDK: Wow to Sun!

Since the announce from Sun that they will Open Source Java and my complain about the way they did it in Debian (without even asking publicly to the Debian-Java team), they did a lot of progress. I and other members of Debian-Java had a lot of contacts with Tom Marble and we do still have a lot of contacts with him (he often comes to #debian-java).

The first things they did was to explain their point of view about the surprising announce and also listen to our complains and try to find a way to work with us (and it's not that easy, every Debian Dev can say that ;-)).

Second, they came with the strong staff from OpenJDK at the FOSDEM, crossing the Ocean for the whole weekend to exchange point of views with DevJam (GNU Classpath, Free VM's and all the distribution's java team). They did not come to say how they will do things, they came to find the better way to work in collaboration with the community!

Third, they prepared and managed the meeting in a very professional and deep way. They know the subject and when there is a gap, they did not try to provide a one way solution, but they proposed solutions and they were open to proposals.

Many thanks to the Sun's staff for the good work and I hope the collaboration will be successful for Sun and for Free Software.

Meetings

As usual, it was a super great pleasure to meet Mark Wielaard, Dalibor Topic, Michael Koch, Roman Kennke, Robert Schuster, those I already cite in this blog and others (those I forgot and those I did not know yet) ;-)

Thanks

Thanks to the FOSDEM team and to all the DevJammer's (include those from Sun ;-)).

FOSDEM 2006

I was not a part of the devrooms team this year (like the last two years), Pascal did all the job! I was just a simple visitor and it's a very cool position. Mark already bloged about the Classpath's presentations, so you can find some interresting slides there.

Saturday (25th February 2006)

RMS

Excellent talk about the patent. As always, Richard Stallman has great images to explain complex things. I still can't understand all the GPL3 changes but I'll try to read some more articles about it.

Putting 'Free' into JFreeChart

The presentation from David Gilbert was very cool. I did not know JFreeChart and it is really cool! This is a very big project and it makes very beautiful charts. I'd like to find some charts to do just to use it!

Eclipse for GNU Classpath Development

Tom Tromey did a fantastic presentation again. I already saw his presentations past years and it was still excellent. He already tried to explain me how to set up this Eclipse/GNU Classpath setup on IRC but I missed the "Don't build automatically" hack. Everything should be on the Classpath's wiki.

Xen

A presentation by Ian Pratt, leader of the Xen Source project. I heard about this project but I didn't know that you could move an instance from a machine to another one! Amazing!

Sunday (26th February 2006)

I met Wouter in the bus but he lost his voice and asked me to introduce the speakers of the Debian room. I'm sorry for the three speakers I announced if it was not just as good as if Wouter did it. I wanna intend to the two conferences anyway.

Women in Free Software

I already wanna be at the talk of last year but I was in the Classpath devroom. Hanna M Wallach did a fantastic talk. I learned a lot of things and I know now that there really is a need of the debian-women project. I proposed her to put a phrase or a logo or something on the Debian-Java projects web pages and she seems to be pleased. Tonight, I went on #debian-women and it seems I did not understand nothing :-D. So maybe I'd better do nothing about this unless I understand what I could do to help.

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port

After the talk of Hanna, I introduced the kFreeBSD talk of Aurelien Jarno. I wanna listen to this talk because I completely don't know *BSD... I'm sorry but I don't know more. And I still don't know the difference with Linux and don't know why I should, as a simple user change to some *BSD port?

Debian-Java Meeting

After the kFreeBSD talk, I introduced the SLIND talk in the Debian Room, told Wouter that I go to the Classpath Devroom... and listen to the end of the talk of Christian Thalinger (CacaoJVM -- the site was down when I tried). Sorry Christian, I just don't understant these thing :-D

During the talk (or was this just after the talk of Robert about JamVM?), I went eating with Wolfgang Baer. We went back during the Christian's talk.

Then we had a Debian-Java talk (I should be writing down the summary of this meeting instead of blogging)... I'll send an email about the meeting, don't worry ;-)

Future of Classpath

It is the time when Mark ask everybody: What do you do? How can we help you? It's a great social/technical time when everybody listen carrefully to everybody. It's wonderful. Maybe it's the part I prefer in free software. I must say that I read some mailing lists before joining some project and the 'Classpath' (and friends) projects were the one I prefer because of that respect.

Then came the camera... A team came in the room to film us. They claim they were making a movie about Free Software. Funny ;-) I discussed a little bit with the woman that seems to be the director and she asked for my email (no, Hanna, it was not because she felt I am sexy ;-), nobody tells me 100 times I'm sexy ;-)). I told her I was not one of the main contributor but she just wanna talk about free software and understand how it works.

Closing Talk: The Challenge of the GNU/Linux Desktop by Jeff Waugh

Jeff Waugh is an excellent speaker, I really enjoyed the presentation. A lot of humour, a lot of facts, it was really an excellent presentation. But Jeff, I still do not understand the Ubuntu business plan. I'm not a native english speaker and I did not understand a lot of jokes and some responses.

Back!

I messed up with my GSM, lost my PIN number or someting I don't know (I did it a thousand times!), I went to the shop today (Feb. 28) to be able to call again. I also went to the office and the alarm was on... I asked for the security guard (I did not want to take risks the day of my birthday: February 28th)... we found nobody but someone tryied to enter on Sunday.

I'll try to prepare some report about Debian-Java tomorrow. The report will be reviewed by Wolfgang and Michael and I'll send it on the debian-java list on Saturday or on Sunday.

First Xen experience

After the Xen presentation at the FOSDEM, I did want to test this wonderful concept. I google around and found a very good page: http://julien.danjou.info/xen.html. I did not read all the document and install and start configuring everything. The first problem was network. It was hard to know exactly what was wrong because the machine is on a NAT, behind a firewall and it's a friend/co-worker who manage it and he really block everything! :-)

I went to OTFC#debian-xen trying to find some help and chatted with 'jd_'... the author of the link above. Some of the best mistake where not configuring /etc/fstab, bad MAC Address, and change the tty1 entry with 'console' in /etc/inittab. Julien also gave me another very good documentation in french: http://wiki.gcu.info/doku.php?id=linux:xen.

The Xen experience is smashing! You have two independant Debian system (with two different IP's) on the same box! Maybe the experienced admins will laugh reading these lines, but I'm very impressed by my Xen experience.

Julien also invited me for a dinner on a wendsday evening because he said "I'm a winner" :-D.

Many thanks Julien.

Excellent weekend! (FOSDEM)

Excellent weekend at the FOSDEM! I met Dalibor Topic and Mark Wielaard once more, Chris Gray, Stéphane and a lot of other folks from the classpath/kaffe/FreeJVMs world. Glad to meet Gadek and SGybas also (my first sponsor and my advocate)! Also, I've been afraid by a tall guy and did not realized he was Mister Jim Pick (Kaffe) ;-). The most important presentation we attented (with Stefan Gybas) was the gcj presentation by Tom Tromey. Gcj 'compile java sources to native code' will maybe drive our goals in Debian... (Note: Yes it's out dated but hey! I promise to add new entries more often!).