Free and Open Source Software Developers' Meeting -- Report
The Debian Project was present at this event with a booth and quite a lot of developers used this as a meeting point. The event was hosted at the Université Libre de Bruxelles.
Saturday, February 8th, 2003
The event started with a keynote by John 'maddog' Hall who talked about the History of Free Software. After this introduction Richard M. Stallman discussed Software Patents.
Several interesting talks took place on Saturday (e.g. Gnome, PostgreSQL, Bugzilla, ...). For Debian Martin Michlmayr gave a presentation on embian (Embedded Debian). The Debian booth was staffed with at least five people so we had the chance to talk to every visitor. Thanks to Rémi Letot for organizing the nice stand. Russell Coker brought a machine running SE Linux (Security Enhanced Linux) for some sort of "Capture The Flag" action and made it available for the meeting. He was willing to give away an award for the first person who was able to compromise the box. There was of course no need for that.
The evening ended with a nice dinner and some beer at a piano bar with some Belgian locals.
Sunday, February 9th, 2003
In the morning Raphaël Hertzog gave a talk about the DebianEdu subproject which attracted quite a lot of people for such an early lecture. He explained why DebianEdu is a good meeting point for all educational initiatives that are popping up in local context. During the rest of the day there was a lot of nice chatting at the Debian booth. Additionally, Russell gave an unscheduled talk about SE Linux which attracted some visitors too. Thanks to FOSDEM's flexibility and reactivity for that.
