Subscribe to my feedFOSDEM 2007
Last week, I attended FOSDEM for the third time in my short life, and I liked what I saw. FOSDEM is an open source convention, held every year at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Being one of the largest open source gatherings in Europe, it would be a crime not to go when I live so close to it, while hunderds of people travel from all over the world to see what is going on in the open source community. I arrived around 11.00, so I had some time to check out the booths before I went to the first interesting talk. This year, there were a few newcomers among them: most notable Google and OpenEmbedded. As a gadget addict, that last one was particularly interesting for me. So after stocking up on free CD's, magazines and stickers, I went to the Janson room to listen to some Sun employee talk about the ups and downs of releasing Java under the GPL.
Liberating Java
First talk on my todo-list was Liberating Java, by Simon Phipps. It was a very interesting talk, although it was more like he was trying to promote Sun in the open-source community than trying to address the issues around the opening of Java. That said, I do think that Sun deserves a little credit for what it has done lately. The last few years, Sun has been actively supporting the Open Source movement more than most companies, and it has released several of it's flagship products (such as parts of Solaris and Java) under an open source license. I don't understand why people think so badly of the company. From the actual Java vs GPL talk I mainly remembered that there are problems releasing the Graphics2D code because something about the colour management can't be legally released, so they are looking at the Classpath community to contribute that code. They also announced that there will be a buildable and completely open JDK available in the first half of this year, and they intend to have it included in Fedora Core and Debian Main repositories. In this version, the parts of Java which can't be open sourced will be replaced by open source implementations. This means no more hassle when you're trying to get Java going on your Linux box!
ReactOS
One of the talks I was looking forward the most was probably the one about ReactOS. For those of you who don't know ReactOS yet, it's an open source implementation of the Windows(R) operating system, both software and drivers will be binary compatible. Yes, that's right, a completely free, open source Windows replacement. It's target is Windows 2003 compatibility, but unfortunately we still have a long road ahead of us before we can just run Windows applications without paying the price. ReactOS is still very unstable, and progress is very slow, mainly because they have had to check all there code for parts of the leaked Windows source code. This process has taken a very long time and has made the contributing of code less flexible. Unfortunately, I did not hear much of the talk due to the accent of the speaker, which was very hard to understand. He did give us a demonstration of the current state of ReactOS, which did look rather nice, but he failed to provide us with a Blue Screen of Death (although he ensured us that they had implemented it). I think this project is definitely something you have to keep a close eye on.
LinuxBIOS
I never heard of LinuxBIOS before, but it seemed interesting enough and I had nothing planned until the kernel talk, so I went and had a look at what they were doing. LinuxBIOS is a BIOS replacement, based on Linux. Althought they have a lot of major shifts in approach behind them, currently they offer BIOS upgrades for many mainboards, containing some really scary bootstrap code (did you know that you need to initialize your RAM?), a linux kernel and a set of drivers. The BIOS is probably the last bastion proprietary software has managed to hold on the PC platform, and now with LinuxBIOS maturing, we are coming closer to overcome it's domination there as well. Many major hardware manufacturers (such as MSI and AMD) have contributed code for their own chipsets and components, and some even offer a LinuxBIOS flash rom upgrade on their site. LinuxBIOS uses an ingenious system with a cluster of mainboards to test whether they do not any of the supported devices when they update, which distributes upgrades over the internet, where computers automatically flash a set of mainboards connected to them, and when an error occurs, a mail is sent to the mailing list reporting which device no longer works. Although there aren't that many PC's using LinuxBIOS yet, the project has managed to increase it's user base ten fold every year since 2000, and now an internet terminal sold in India is using LinuxBIOS, and there are at least one million of these devices. It's also going to be used in the One Laptop Per Child computers. One of the coolest things about LinuxBIOS is the incredibly fast boot time. While BIOS has to keep doing a load of legacy stuff and does things nobody even wants to know about, LinuxBIOS can have your operating system loaded so fast, you won't even notice it's there. Booting Linux in seconds is within our reach.
Linux Kernel
Kernel talks are always interesting. Except this one. The speaker obviously didn't want to be speaking at FOSDEM. He basically complained about how crappy community coders were and what a hassle it was to coordinate our efforts. He complained about code cleanups, and just discouraged code contributions. Not really a good spokesperson for the kernel developers.
OpenMoko
I wrote about this earlier, and being a huge fan of embedded devices, I just couldn't afford to miss this talk. It was in a small room but it attracted more people than you fit in the space available, even if you stacked them on top of each other. Let's say there's more than enough people interested in an open phone. Most of what was told were things we already know, but we got a little more information about what's going to happen in the near future. The framework is coming closer to being complete, and we got real device screenshots for the first time. While the device will only be released to the public at large in September, the developer version will be receive an upgrade in June, including more memory, a faster CPU, and most notably: UMTS and wireless internet. Take that, iPhone. I've also played around with a demo unit for a while, and currently the interface is absolutely not finger-ready yet. I had to pull out a stylus to do any clicking. However, the finger widgets are mostly finished so it shouldn't take to long before they get integrated in the user interface. While they don't have multitouch technology, they have a cute finger based scroll wheel which can be hidden and shown automatically by the software, and which is perfectly placed at the edge of the screen, where your thumbs will usually be resting. I'm probably going to buy one eventually, so more on this later.
Conclusion
Looking back, this year was probably the best FOSDEM I attended so far, with more interesting talks than anyone can attend. I was interested in a lot more of them, but I think I managed to see the best of FOSDEM 2007. Until next year...