Although quite long and expensive, the trip to FOSDEM 2007 in Brussels was absolutely great! After skipping the Beer Event Friday night since I had to finish my slides, I joined the keynote presentations on Saturday morning. The organizing team opened the conference with their traditional FOSDEM dance, followed by a more serious speech about resp. against software patents in Europe. Then, Jim Gettys talked about current hardware issues in the OLPC project by listing the impressive entrails of the upcoming mobile device, e.g. the 1200×900 pixel screen making it a nice 200dpi e-book reader. In the sleek presentation of Simon Phipps, he explained Sun’s reasons to open up Java - even by letting people from the free Java projects speak about their opinions and future plans.

Later on in the ResearchRoom@FOSDEM, the several million Euro funded EU research projects on OSS were outlined by their representants. Starting with Rishab Gosh, he presented the goals and design of the soon finished FLOSSWorld project which conducted 40 surveys in different countries all over the world and which results will be presented in an EU workshop in May 2007. Then, Georgios Gousios explained how the SQO-OSS project quantitatively analyzes the source code, the code repository and mailing lists of open source projects in order to measure software quality. After that I visited the presentation of Linux kernel developer Andrew Morton whom I sat next to in the morning and thus got some interesting information about his previous work at OSDL and the current one at Google. While taking place in the small 72-seats Embedded room, there were probably as many people at the great OpenMoKo presentation as in the main hall… (see also photos)

The other day started with my presentation on issues about firm involvement in OSS and Cristina Rossi’s on her current paper on this topic. During the short panel we had some interesting discussions with the other participants, Carlos Guerreiro (OSSO Desktop team leader at Nokia), Xavier Heymans (CEO of Zea Partners) and Kurt Gramlich (German project lead of Skolelinux). In the following discussion researchers asked how they are able to support OSS developers in their work - again a very intriguing question not easy to answer for both sides.

The next, more practitioner oriented presentation was given by Murray Cumming about Glom, a easy to use Access-like database tool for GNOME. And as a great conclusion I finally visited for the first time one of the very entertaining (and little bit informative, too) performances of Miguel de Icaza.

So it was really a nice weekend networking among other OSS researchers, talking to Nokia and Maemo.org developers for further interviews and getting contacts of OSS projects for the next but one OpenExpo event on September 19th and 20th, 2007 in Zürich. And, after all, the trip was great since Emanuel Indermühle came along, my renowned companion for many software adventures. (e.g. getting to know Ruby on Rails on our 7h-trip back to Bern and finding out that our Vida framework beats it by far ;)