nion's blog

Ever heard about the ITB? If not, the website describes it as the leading trade fair for the international tourismus industry. INTERNATIONAL is the keyword here. I got a copy of their invitation flyers today and the QA they did for the front cover speaks for itself. It seems to be a nice INTERNATIONAL event.
Look at this (click on it to see the full cover):



This is no photo edit by me!

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.

Today RMS gave talk in Berlin with the title "Richard Stallman presenting Free Software".
And I have to admit I don't see any reason why people visit this talk apart from the typical fanboy thing.

I mean ok, he's RMS and he did great things for the world of Free Software. But this is mostly a philosophy not some software he can present nice nifty features for. I assume most of the people visiting this already know about Free Software so what do they expect from this talk apart from a quick glance on their "star"? They shouldn't get any information they don't know already and thus the gain of this is close to zero.

Sure you also want to see your favorite artist live on stage some time too but that's a totally different thing because bands do stuff with tones. It's also a totally different experience to be on a concert waving people all around you and you listen to great music. That's a different thing than watching a DVD of a concert at home. But what is it here, sitting around with other "nerds" listening to software philosophy you already know. Yeah!

So the fanboy thing is the only (of course a valid) reason I can see here but hey, would you attend a Bruce Schneier talk if its about rot13? I hope not unless the next step is asking him for an autograph
Oh and before someone comes up with this (sure it's a matter of taste), he is not a great entertainer always having a good joke in the queue ;-P

People who didn't know about Free Software yet, I hope you enjoyed the show and start to think about it

The website for the Chemnitzer Linuxtage is online now.
Like every year I am looking really forward to this event which is in my opinion the best linux event in Germany, at least most of the fun I have on linux events in Germany I have on this event.

After reading that Wolfgang Schäuble (in my opinion one of the biggest assholes we have in Germany) will be the patron of the LinuxTag I am really not sure if I will visit the LinuxTag. This would be my first time cause I had the impression that the LinuxTag is a) very commercial oriented (aka for business users) and b) Karlsruhe was always too far away for me.

I guess a big part of the critics against the plans of Schäuble are people from the OS,FS,Linux, and now this event has him as patron?
I am sorry to say this, but whoever made this decision, FUCK OFF!

And yes I know that it's tradition to use the Bundesinnenministerium for the patron but this is really overkill!


UPDATE: there is an official statement regarding this issue now: http://www.linuxtag.org/2007/de/home/willkommen/newsitem/article/stellungnahme-zur-schirmherrschaft.html (sorry German)