The obligatory FOSDEM post

Alright, time to write something about the visit to FOSDEM.
Everything started Friday evening with the traditional beer event in the Delirium Café where you could get a beer flatrate for 20 Euros. This was also the reason why I didn't attend much talks on Saturday, I was heavily drunk and had some pain in my back because I had a phsyical contact with a rotary spray later
The Belgiens seem to have really nice beer glasses called Chevalier btw.

Besides meeting and chatting with people on Saturday I just attended the opening speech about Linux usage in Hollywood. I was really surprised that nearly every special effect seems to be rendered on Linux server farms starting with the famous Titanic movie. Sadly this is done exclusively with proprietary tools.

On Sunday I saw a some more talks like for example the one on packageKit and to be honest this seems to be a big piece of crap to me. Why do people always want to reimplement Windoze? The aim of packageKit is to make package management easy across different distributions. It uses dbus and basically hides every technical aspect of package management from the user. One thing that was mentioned as a feature is that developers from different distros can work together on packages and thus you free development resources. While this is true I don't see the need for this cause a) we have enough development resources and b) this also prevents people from becoming creative because they actually work into different directions. It's sad that most people in the Linux community try to create a replacement for Windows (Richard even mentioned that Windows Vista does it right).

A cool thing I heard about is cloudbridges which seems to be a really cool idea. It's an application that you can install into your profile on a social network site. By doing this you can connect to other people in different networks. The idea of this was to stay in contact with people in social networks without actually being forced to create an account for this. So basically it creates a "meta"-social network. Sadly I had not time to try it out yet.

The FOSDEM itself is a cool event mostly focused on developers and not end-users. There are multiple devrooms for the FOSS projects. I can really recommend it, however some things
were not as nice as expected. In my opinion the location needs a lot improvements. It is rather small and unlike I thought the devrooms had no space to actually do development on project related issues. They were purely intended to be used for talks and they were not really big, I had problems to get into the devroom of Debian and therefore I could not attend some talks I was interested in.

The food was really bad. You could buy some sandwiches, cans of cola and water and there was snack bar booked for the event which had hamburgers (they call it hamburgers, actually it was some bread, a slice of meat and onions, no cheese, no salad etc.), some sausages and fries. While this is not a real problem by itself it was at least for me because the only alternative in the environment of the event was a chicken snackbar. So there was no alternative to drinking 0.3 ltr cans the whole day and eating fries. The toilets were also rather bad. Funnily looking at these facts Brüssel was still more expensive than Berlin.

Brüssel itself was also not the European capital city I expected it to be. At least to me it appeared to be dilapidated. You have modern buildings next to old buildings next to buildings that look like ruins. The whole thing combined with people telling you that you should watch your stuff because it's dangerous. Sure there are nice places like the Grand Place but most of them seem to be there to cover the problems in the rest of the city. To me Brüssel was the ugliest capital city in Europe I visited so far.