This year’s FOSDEM was a great experience, especially for my first time. I arrived on Wednesday morning, and did some sight-seeing (poor navigating) on my own, and met up with Tom F., Tom M., and Steph on Thursday for moules, waffles and more sight-seeing. On Friday, a few of us visited the Leonardo Da Vinci Expo in the morning and then attended the festivities in the evening.
Friday
We attended the (Free Java only) Beer Event at BXL. I got to meet everyone from GNU Classpath that I have worked with since 2005. This was great, considering I was never able to put a face to an IRC nick for a few years. Also, all the faces behind OpenJDK at Sun. I got a chance to grill Mark Reinhold about all the things I didn’t know about OpenJDK, and it was nice to hear that he acknowledge everything we had problems with. There seems to be an internal struggle with trying to get the everyone at Sun on the same page in regards to OSS. Following that, we were told we couldn’t eat the amazing cheese Mario brought all the way from Italy, though the knife wouldn’t cooperate with us either. After this, we visited a few other pubs and, eventually, I made it to bed.
Saturday
I wasn’t sure what to expect from the talks, or structure of FOSDEM, but everything flowed really well. I really wasn’t impressed with the Keynote speakers: the first to take stage was “Linux in Hollywood”, and while I felt it was mainly geared towards teenage boys, it wasn’t very appropriate for a FOSS event. They admitted a lot of the software they use is proprietary. This was followed by a talk on FreeBSD and then one on Software Patents.
After lunch, we all swarmed the Free Java Room. I was lucky enough to get a seat! By the time the Mobile Java talks started, there were no seats or much standing room. I really enjoyed all three talks by twisti, Guillaume and Ray, since I didn’t know very much about mobile Java. Guillaume showed a few really great demos of MIDPath running on a mobile.
After this, the JDuchess women talked about Women in Java. The struggles and what we can do about it. It was really interesting to hear the discussion that took place afterwards and to hear everyone’s thoughts. Some people agreed it was a problem, or that it just stems from the history of the industry. Ray Gans made a really interesting point about the correlation between the amount of women that get into IT and those that attend single-sex schools. Overall, there were a lot of women that attended the talk- by far the most I have seen in one room at the entire conference!
Unfortunately, I missed part of Roman’s talk on his OpenJDK Experiences. If anyone has taped this or has the slides, please post them. Andrew Hughes talk on BrandWeg (FirePath in Dutch) was really interesting, he talked about creating an inverse of IcedTea, which is neat because it would include Roman’s Escher work and Mario’s GConf stuff.
Following that, Dalibor gave a talk on Kaffe. I have never directly used Kaffe, but it seemed to be going in great direction. He said he is moving towards using OpenJDK (or IcedTea) and told us how he was able to reduce the sources from 11M to 2M! Also, Peter Kessler spoke about HotSpot, Jeroen talked about ikvm and why it is being used- he did end his talk by saying GNU Classpath was a toy 
I was expecting a small war to break out! Gary Benson ended the day with his zero-assembler presentation. While it was unfortunate he only had 10 minutes to present, he really did a good job of getting the main points across.
We then made our way to the dinner event. Thanks to Tom and David for organizing this.
Sunday
Sunday was less busy. We seemed to have a lot of time between talks to discuss things on everyone’s mind, including @author tags, mailing-lists, etc. Also, the room was less busy for the morning- everyone slept in? Doko, Tom F, Petteri talked about packaging on different distros. It was really cool to see how differently (and similarily) things are done in comparison to Fedora.
David Herron gave a talk on testing and then I, nervously, took the stage. While being incredibly nervous (and dealing with a fear of public speaking) I was able to get through all my slides and points in the allocated amount of time. Luckily, all the NetX demos worked! Tom F continued with his talk on LiveConnect and gcjwebplugin, and showed a few pretty impressive demos.
Unfortunately, I missed the FBToolkit talk 
Again, if anyone has this taped, please let me know.
Onno gave his talk on the JCK. He surprised everyone with the news that jtreg has been GPL’d! Apparently, well before FOSDEM. Andrew Haley followed with his IcedTea and Compatibility, the issues at hand and how far we have come in regards to IcedTea. Dalibor closed the event with his talk about the JCP, how to fix it and make money
After the talks completed, we went to dinner. I met some more people from the community that I only knew by name. It was sad to say bye to everyone after an incredible weekend.
Thanks to Tom Marble for MC’ing in the Free Java Room and setting up the schedule, and everyone else involved. I have posted my pictures from the entire weekend here.
See you in 2009!
