Hey, better late then never :-) A month ago on the first weekend of February the openSUSE Project went to Brussels, Belgium for FOSDEM - The Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting. openSUSE community members from Germany, the UK, France, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and the US gathered to learn new things about various FOSS projects, run an openSUSE booth and participate in the cross-distribution developer room. Conference ---------- The conference schedule of FOSDEM was packed as usual. They run a main track including 4 keynotes, around ~15 developer rooms and lightning talk track. At FOSDEM you always miss more interesting talks then you attend, the choice is amazing. The main tracks were mostly about the web, the cloud and office applications. In the DevRooms you find tracks of many major upstream projects like Mozilla, GNU or MySQL/PostgreSQL but also topic focused tracks like Cross-Desktop, Systems Management or Open Source Telephony. Visitor wise this years edition was more crowded then ever before, a lot of times you stood before closed doors because the rooms simply couldn't take any more people. They even managed to fill up the largest room, which is one of the largest auditoriums in Belgium with 1400 seats, up to the limit (and more). openSUSE Booth -------------- The project booth was also a big success. On our two 22" touchscreens we showed our distribution, including a GNOME3 preview, and our tools like the Build Service and SUSE Studio. People are in general really interested and are amazed at the speed we can pick up new developments from the wider FOSS community. A lot of great conversations about many technical and social details took place on our booth. We also handed out around 1.000 promo DVDs, countless stickers and project folders. As the Nürnberg folks chartered their own Bus to Brussels they brought 20 cases of our own openSUSE Brew "Old Toad" and we sold them for an Euro and donated the money to FOSDEM. The same we did with around 400 T-shirts. This made our booth a hotspot and a fun place to hang out and we were able to draw in many people with this. Additionally the FOSDEM crew and the local IT chair were of course really happy to receive some donations from us. As a direct result of this the students from the IT chair took a couple of hundred promo DVDs to distribute on the campus. It's stuff like this that brings the openSUSE project back on the map as contributors to the wider community. Cross-Distro DevRoom -------------------- openSUSE also participated in the Cross-Distro DevRoom. We held 7 talks in the track with topics ranging from Vincents AppStream initiative over Bernhards openQA system to Jos having a chair on the "distribution collaboration manifesto" panel discussion. All talks where well received and especially on the topic of distribution tools we can always amaze people of what we have in production and can do with it. We are unchallenged in this area! Of course we also helped with the organization and took over a huge part of the moderation, additionally we were responsible for the videotaping of the talks. Here is a list of talks we held in this devroom. Amazing openSUSE - Jos Poortvliet Application Installer - Vincent Untz Distribution collaboration manifesto - Jos Poortvliet ZYpp your distro - Dominik Heidler Duncan Mac-Vicar P. How to make QA-engineers start drooling - Bernhard M. Wiedemann One source to rule all binaries - Sascha Peilicke You can find them and all the other talks that took place in this DevRoom on our blip.tv channel http://opensuse.blip.tv/posts?view=archive&nsfw=dc Conclusion ---------- FOSDEM is the last big true FOSS community event. No big corporate market stalls with sales representatives in them, no boring marketing talks, no bullshit. Just Free and Open Source Software community coming together to collaborate, teach and have fun with each other. One has to note that they pull this event off only with volunteers and donations which is very impressive. A nice thing this conference showed is that the topic of cross-distribution collaboration, which we brought up on the openSUSE Conference '10, is catching on. There are more an more things happening around this (AppStream, Bretzn, etc.) and we start to see a cultural shift in the wider community. Developers finally step up and talk to each other and leave the distro bashing to the religious user crowds. We believe this is a major game changer for the future. All in all FOSDEM is, and will continue to be, a highlight in our calendar. Henne -- Henne Vogelsang, openSUSE. Everybody has a plan, until they get hit. - Mike Tyson -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org