Czanik@BalaBit

Last weekend I visited Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting, or FOSDEM (http://fosdem.org/), as more widely known. It was held in Brussels, at the campus of ULB. Over 5000 hackers were present from all over Europe, and some also from overseas. There were many interesting and hot topics presented, including programming languages, databases, office suites, embedded development. As community manager, who keeps in touch with many different Linux distributions, BSDs I spent most of my time in the cross distro devrooms.

One of the greatest strength of FOSDEM is, that one can meet and talk people who one can only read in the news or talk to on IRC. Project leaders of Debian, Fedora and openSUSE were there, just as leaders and members of many other projects. Things, what are difficult to manage by e-mail can be solved within minutes just by walking to a stand and discussing the problem there. The syslog-ng maintainer at a major Linux distribution did not have time for regular updates and fixes recently.
We tried to resolve the situation for a long time. At FOSDEM a new maintainer was found within 15 minutes, once I explained the problem at the distributions stand.

The ‘cross distro devrooms’ had some very good presentations and discussions about upstream – downstream relations. Working mostly as syslog-ng upstream but also as downstream package maintainer at some distributions, I’m quite familiar with both end of the problems. I was happy to learn from the presentations, that we at Balabit are doing the right thing with syslog-ng. Participating in discussions also helped to find the right direction dealing with a problematic upstream project of syslog-ng.

Being at FOSDEM also helped to spread the word about syslog-ng and Zorp GPL. Proudly wearing my syslog-ng t-shirt prototype I talked to many people, including developers, sysadmins and even sales.

Of course I attended also some other sessions. There were some very interesting presentations about software testing and embedded development. There were also many tables full with ARM and MIPS based devices.

This years FOSDEM just finished, but we are already thinking about what comes next. As regular Zorp GPL releases are nearing we hope to present it next year at FOSDEM trying to involve more developers. The idea of creating a FOSDEM like conf in Budapest of Central and Eastern European developers also came up at FOSDEM. Brussels is quite far away from here, and a nearby location would hopefully attract more developers from the region.