In my last posting, I mentioned that I'm going to attend some conferences. This was mainly to inform you what I'm up to and in order to arrange face-to-face meetings. I've now returned from my travels and would like to provide a summary.
Over the last two weeks, I attended three conferences: Open Source World Conference (OSWC) in Spain, FOSDEM in Belgium, and a conference in Italy organized by Firenze Tecnologia. Open Source World Conference. Malaga, Spain (18-20 February, 2004) =================================================================== OSWC was a conference organized by the government of Andalucia and attracted many high profile speakers, including the Prince of Spain and the President of Andalucia who gave the opening speeches. The conference was larger than I had expected and was very professionally organized. Entrance was free for students and 5 EUR for other people, and there were apparently free buses to the event from various universities. The event had a conference session with various talks (translated simultaneously in English and Spanish), and there was also an exhibition floor with booths. As part of the conference, a meeting on Debian based distributions was held [1]. Representatives from Guadalinex, Linex and SkoleLinux, and some Debian developers were invited by the government of Andalucia to attend this meeting. Common problems Debian based distributions were discussed and we talked about ways to work together more closely. A summary of this meeting is being worked on by some peoplo who attended, and I hope it will be posted soon. Since Wichert Akkerman had been invited to this meeting, I suggested to use the opportunity to discuss the status of dpkg as well as multi-arch support. Unfortunately, on the day of the conference it turned out that Wichert could not come because of work; he kindly summarized his thoughts about dpkg by e-mail and we used this as a basis for discussions. Wichert's message is available at [2] and Scott James Remnant, who attended the meeting, together with Tollef Fog Heen and Colin Watson, will post a summary of their discussions as a follow-up message soon. People interested in helping with the development and bug triaging of dpkg can use these messages as a starting point to see how they can help. On Friday morning, there was a panel about "The future of Open Source - vision from the gurus" in which Bdale Garbee (HP), Danese Cooper (Sun), Miguel de Icaza (Ximian) and myself participated. Everyone spoke for about 10 minutes and then we answered questions from the audience. During the conference, I also talked to the Chief Technology Evangelist of Sun. We talked about making their Java implementation truly free software, and discussed how Sun and Debian can work together more closely. I promised to send him a list of things we would like to see from Sun. Ben Collins informed me about some hardware which would be useful for our SPARC port, I'd like to be put in contact with an engineer who can test debian-installer on a wide range of Sun hardware (SPARC, Intel and Opteron). I also asked our OpenOffice.org maintainers if they need anything. In summary, the conference was a great success. It was lots of fun to meet some of the Spanish Debian crowd, and I think the meetings were quite productive. FOSDEM. Brussels, Belgium (21-22 February, 2004) ================================================= FOSDEM is the Free and Open Source Software Developers Meeting. It is one of the largest developer's gatherings in Europe, and I really enjoyed it last year. This year FOSDEM was even bigger; like last year, Debian had a booth, but this time we also shared a conference room with some Free Java developers. We arranged some meetings to discuss how our Java packages in contrib can be moved to main. I could not attend these meetings because I was busy talking to other people, but I heard that the meetings were quite productive. Arnaud Vandyck, Grzegorz Prokopski, Stefan Gybas and others represented Debian, and they promised to post a summarize to -project and -java soon. I used FOSDEM to talk to various people. I approached Keith Packard to discuss the status and future of X. Keith is leading the Freedesktop.org effort, and he told me that he is currently working on splitting X into separate components. This work is done upstream, but should also make it easier to package it for Debian and other distributions. He is also working on adding autoconf support, and I put him in contact with Scott James Remnant (our maintainer of libtool, who is also part of upstream) in case he needs any help. Scott and Keith exchanged some mail since then. I asked Keith to get in contact with our XFree86 maintainer to see how Keith's work can be integrated into Debian, and to discuss the future of X in Debian. Keith is also in the NM queue and interested in helping with packaging. I also talked to some KDE people who are involved in the debian-kde project. A growing number of KDE developers are interested in better integration of KDE and Debian and cooperation between the two projects. There will be a KDE development conference in Germany from 21st to 29th of August, and it would be good if some of our KDE maintainers could attend. (On a related note, GNOME's development conference GUADEC 2004 is going to take place in Norway from June 28-30. If anyone intends to attend this or the KDE conference, please let me know so we can arrange a Debian meeting.) I also briefly talked to Jonathan Corbet of Linux Weekly News (LWN), thanked him for the excellent work they are doing and offered assistance for Debian related coverage. He said that he follows -devel-announce and -devel already, but that he'd get in contact if he needs anything. By the way, free LWN subscriptions for Debian developers (kindly sponsored by HP) are still available (see [3]). Alasdair G Kergon, who organizes UKUUG's conferences, helped out at FOSDEM and he mentioned that the CFP for their next conference will soon be out. We talked about possible topics, and Alasdair seemed interested in me submitting a talk about quality issues in free software and Debian. I have also been told that various people approached Tim O'Reilly to urge him to get their Debian book [4] updated. Tim seemed in favour of this, and I'll contact him soon to see if Debian can do anything to help make this possible. FOSDEM was quite different to OSWC since it's more developer's oriented. It was a great opportunity to start discussions with various people both from Debian and from other projects. Firenze Tecnologia. Florence, Italy (February 24-27, 2004) =========================================================== The Media Innovation Unit of Firenze Tecnologia are the people carrying out work on DeMuDi (a multimedia distribution based on Debian). They invited me to Florence for some meetings about the future of DeMuDi, and asked me to give a talk about Debian at a workshop they organized. DeMuDi is a project which has been funded by the European Commission (EC) for the last two years. The EC funding will run out soon, but Firenze Tecnologia will continue to pay at least one person to work on it for the next year. We discussed the future of DeMuDi, and agreed that there is only a future if the work can be fully integrated into Debian. We discussed how this should be done, and I offered my help if they have any problems. They are interested in getting involved in our Debian Multimedia project, and I think that they'll do the right thing and contribute to Debian. On Thursday, there was a workshop for small and medium businesses and the public administration. I talked about Debian, and quite a few people were interested in the project and our distribution, asking me various questions after the talk. I found the meetings very productive. They are trying to do the right thing and they have good people working on the project, such as Andrea Glorioso, who is a Debian developer. London ====== On my way back to Cambridge, I passed through London and used this opportunity to meet some people. Someone recently contacted me because they are interested in starting a Debian based project, and they want to work closely with Debian. I spent a couple of hours together with him to give advice and discuss how this should be done. It looks very promising, but I'm unfortunately not in a position to say much more at the moment. Later, I went to the company James Bromberger is working for because they're switching to Debian; they are interested in having a 64 bit port of Debian to PowerPC and are willing to invest resources in this. James and I talked about this in detail, and I promised to follow-up with my IBM contacts again to see whether they are still interested in donating a 64 bit machine to us. It's good to see interest in this port, and James might be able to spend some of his work time on getting it started. [1] http://www.ddeb.org/ddeb [2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-dpkg/2004/debian-dpkg-200403/msg00002.html [3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2003/debian-devel-announce-200308/msg00019.html [4] http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/debian/index.html -- Martin Michlmayr [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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