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Read this interview with Antti to get a basic idea of the benefits:

https://archive.fosdem.org/2013/interviews/2013-antii-kantee/

It really is an ingenious design, and neatly makes the monolithic/microkernel debate irrelevant.

NetBSD should not be allowed to die. If it does, something truly great will have been lost.

Meltdown and Spectre are huge issues for Microkernels. For details see the answer to a question to one of the Hurd developers after the end of the FOSDEM 2018 talk on Hurd's PCI arbiter (minute 31:19 of the video)

Philipp

It depends on what type of CAD you are referring to. There is serious progress in electronic design.

https://fosdem.org/2018/schedu...

As for other vendors, they are not going to change if they think that this is what you want.

The OSI website also used to call mentioning software freedom "ideological tub-thumping". Hardly the kind of language one would use if one wants to seek a respectful difference with the older free software movement (which predates the OSI by over a decade), and there's also the suggestion about open source being "pragmatic" as if free software wasn't pragmatic. If software freedom wasn't pragmatic there would be no need for a proprietor-friendly reaction to challenge it and push for advocating for almost the same software minus the software freedom.

Instead, cozying up to proprietors puts the OSI in a jam when they send out their speakers to make nice with free software activists because the speakers have to avoid explaining away the points the GNU Project brings up far more insightfully in its two main essays (older essay, newer essay) on the topic.

The name "open source" is apparently used by proprietors to put a shine on endorsing proprietary software. Take the recent /. post about "Microsoft Releases Skype As a Snap For Linux" which points us to an article that says "[Microsoft] has actually transformed into an open source champion" while it endorses running software that could not qualify as open source (and studiously avoids any language that might bring software freedom to mind). This kind of conflict comes up from time to time and is a direct result of the coziness with proprietors you refer to; I recall some time ago reading another /. story about an essay by Red Hat lawyer Mark Webbink which tried to explain copyleft without using the word "copyleft" or drawing attention to anything to do with software freedom despite that copyleft is a strategy for preserving the freedoms of free software in derivative works (a strategy for preserving an ethical way to treat people with regard to computers). FOSDEM 2018 just ended and in a talk on the Open Source Initiative we're reminded of a quote from Linus Torvalds, "In real open source, you have the right to control your own destiny.". Torvalds never liked software freedom but found the GPLv2 to be a handy license to use for his published projects such as the Linux kernel and Git. This quote strikes me as an indicator of the same problem: when the phrase "open source" has been lumped in with people who don't adopt that development methodology, and one seeks to place business activity above other social needs (such as controlling one's own computer), one needs a new term ("real open source") to describe a desired distinction.

Sounds like a great candidate for a talk at FOSDEM 2018 Retrocomputing DevRoom. Call for Participation here:
https://lists.fosdem.org/piper...

Disclaimer: I am the author of the following projects. At Red Hat, we have been researching this problem for the last few years. This has resulted in the creation of the Clevis[1] & Tang[2] projects for automating decryption. This currently ships in Fedora and we plan to ship it in a future RHEL release. This project currently supports both root volumes and removable storage, as well as any other data you want to encrypt and then automatically decrypt. We are working on adding support for non-root volumes as well. For a video on the problem of automated decryption and the architecture of Clevis & Tang, see my recent talk at FOSDEM: Securing Automated Decryption[3]. [1]: https://github.com/latchset/cl... [2]: https://github.com/latchset/ta... [3]: https://fosdem.org/2017/schedu...

Check out matrix.org. It's a federated, open-standard, rich communication protocol. It can't do everything of Slack and Whatsapp yet, but it's moving along fast and you can help. There are already several clients to choose from, as well as integrations with other networks, APIs, and bot-like tools etc..

We used it at linux.conf.au 2017 to (inofficially) bridge between Slack and IRC, and had an update of ca. 33% of the conference within 3 days or so, while the number of Slack users went down to a low one-digit figure.

#matrix on Freenode is bridged to the main discussion room, so pop on over if you want.

Here's Matthew (one of the project leads) at FOSDEM (with video):
https://fosdem.org/2017/schedu...
https://fosdem.org/2017/schedu...

and my little lightning talk at LCA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

-- @martinkrafft

Check out matrix.org. It's a federated, open-standard, rich communication protocol. It can't do everything of Slack and Whatsapp yet, but it's moving along fast and you can help. There are already several clients to choose from, as well as integrations with other networks, APIs, and bot-like tools etc..

We used it at linux.conf.au 2017 to (inofficially) bridge between Slack and IRC, and had an update of ca. 33% of the conference within 3 days or so, while the number of Slack users went down to a low one-digit figure.

#matrix on Freenode is bridged to the main discussion room, so pop on over if you want.

Here's Matthew (one of the project leads) at FOSDEM (with video):
https://fosdem.org/2017/schedu...
https://fosdem.org/2017/schedu...

and my little lightning talk at LCA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

-- @martinkrafft

This sounds like a good early step towards a more technologically free future.

Momentum has been building in the open source hardware space since way back. Opencores.org started in 1999 and now has a library of cores, some of which are in commercial use. That project is now forked as librecores.org, paralleling the Openoffice/Libreoffice split, to move project control into the hands of community contributors. Several initiatives are aimed at freeing up the FPGA toochain, including this toolchain project and this FPGA development board for Raspberry PI. Low cost ASIC manufacturing is available through educational institutions and commercial prototyping services are well within the reach of crowd-funded projects. Though it ramps up more slowly than the now-dominant open source software sector due to the higher cost base and more firmly entrenched proprietary barriers, it now seems clear that open source hardware is set to be the Next Big Thing.

I have no idea whether OSHWA is an important part of this landscape at the moment, but it's hard to see how this initiative could hurt. For the time being, the FOSSi Foundation appears considerably more substantial.

Fosdem has over 550 talks, and is completely run by volunteers. It will take some time, but will most likely end up on http://video.fosdem.org/2015.

Will be released in 2015... just sayin'.

Perl is perceived to be a "write only" language ie difficult to read, primarily because of the TIMTOWDTI design philosophy. It's hard to know what the best way to do something in Perl is. It presents many choices and many memes for the same task. This is the opposite of Python's One True Way, which is much easier for novices.

Whether Perl6 is actually any good or not is now irrelevant unfortunately. Perl has well and truly lost the perception battle; language fadism is driven by perceptions and fashion, not so much by reality. In the coding shop where I worked, you couldn't even mention Perl to most of the young coders without getting a superior snort of derision and a subsequent gush about Python, Go, or some Lispy thing. This is a pity since I used to enjoy Perl5.

Will be released in 2015... just sayin'.

So it hasn't actually needed a change in years (meaning it is fully matured) but you're worried that there isn't enough manpower to churn the code (that needs no churning)?!?

I am not worried since I use systemd and will never run a SysVinit distro again in my life. My point was that those who doesn't want to run systemd need to realize that a lot of work is needed in the future, and that the non-systemd camp is entirely responsible for making and maintaining the necessary code in order to e.g. run SysVinit in the future.

Trying to making a virtue out the fact that SysVinit is understaffed (and this is going to get worse when the paid developers from SUSE/RH stops making bugfixes that other distros can leach), seems to be a common reaction among non-systemd users.

There seems to be a lot of reality denying going on among non-systemd users; denial that work is needed to even maintain status quo, that only they are responsible for making it so, and that sitting under the palms waiting for a magical appearance of a non-systemd alternative simply will disappoint.

The failure to realize these future challenges and the lack of coordination and development to face such challenges, will simply doom all general purpose non-systemd distros in the future.

Why in the world would Xorg need systemd? It doesn't need it now.

In order to run X.org without root rights in a safe manner on Linux, you need something to deal with user sessions. Only systemd provides that. Here is a fosdem talk about it:
https://archive.fosdem.org/201...

It is pretty sad to see, that after so many comments nobody really has a clue about what the story is about, and what is happening in the Linux kernel.
The kernel VT system has been considered a monstrosity by kernel developers the last decade and everyone is of the opinion that it should be used to user space.

The finally a really smart guy actually attacks and solve the problem. His name is David Herrmann, and he has tirelessly worked on this for years. Systemd distros will get the full support of his research, simply because almost all Linux distros are using, or a going to use systemd. But don't worry, he has provided rich support user space VT's on non-systemd Linux distros, by eg. "ksmcon"
https://github.com/dvdhrm/kmsc...

Here is his fosdem talk:
https://archive.fosdem.org/201...

Here is his blog that will tell you more about VT's than you ever knew:
http://dvdhrm.wordpress.com/

Here is a wiki link about VT:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Here is an old blog post about the problems with the old kernel VT:
http://dvdhrm.wordpress.com/20...

In short, no need for the systemd opponents to get their panties in a bunch; they can either use Hermanns user space tools, or pretend there isn't a problem and use the present kernel system.

For the rest of us who really likes systemd, this is great news. Thanks to Hermann's work, there will be much better console support for early boot debugging, better security, better keyboard and language handling etc.

While the obvious answer is that Poetternig/RedHat wants a windows alternative they can sell to "big" software developers, a more cynical (and mildly speculative) answer is that systemd is an outstanding way to shoehord into linux all the things that linux users would never normally allow. PID 0 is an important spot to control; if it wants to, it can control what programs are started and under what permissions. There are a few groups that really want this capability, or at least the capability to add something optional that can later be a forced dependency in GNOME or some other popular package.

The first group that comes to mind are the people who want DRM and a protected media path. A monoculture that forces features on users whever it wants to change things is the only way you'd get around the problem of having distributions simply compiling out or otherwise ignoring your DRM. Systemd has effectively raised the costs of not using whatever future "upgrade" is mandated, because the tight integration means you have to replace all the other software you now use as well.

Another group that would really like it if a buggy, alpha-quality, horribly overcomplicated, uncommented, unproven, monolithic black-box of software was a required to use Linux is... the NSA. Simplicity is important when it comes to key services like PID 0. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the NSA is one of RedHat's larger customers, and that the NSA - while suberting NIST, Cisco, etc - submitted various pateches through redhat. I have no proof, of course, but you don't get security by assuming eveybody is being "nice". I strongly suggest listening to PHK's talk on this subject.

Finally, I'll link a post I just made over at HN. The reason systemd is causing emotions to run high is because it is trying to do to linux what has been done to many other tools: dumb it down and hide how it works. There are a lot of people trying to do that right now, because the idea of open computing that *cannot be limited* (see: "turing complete"). Welcome to the Civil-War On General Purpose Computing.

It came up in an interview and was not seen as a big deal because it was linux only by design and not about "bending over backwards for fringe platforms".
https://archive.fosdem.org/201...
Then the developer pool expanded and the design changed - and FYI, policy went from "no compositor but Weston" to "reference compositor". The monolithic design was supposed to be a major feature initially, everyone was supposed to use Weston if they wanted to use Wayland at all. The project is improving, IMHO partly because they now have to be better than what Mir says it's going to be.
It's an example of progress. I really don't get why there is so much hate being spread around here that I can't even point out something good about Wayland without people insisting that I should be saying it started as perfect.

Is there an impact on Linux, is the development being influenced by US Department of Defense and NSA?

Conspiratorial view on Linux security:

Since then, more has happened to reveal the true story here, the depth of which surprised even me. The GTK development story and the systemd debate on Debian revealed much corporate pressure being brought to bear in Linux. [...] Some really startling facts about Red Hat came to light. For me the biggest was the fact that the US military is Red Hat's largest customer:

"When we rolled into Baghdad, we did it using open source," General Justice continued. "It may come as a surprise to many of you, but the U.S. Army is 'the' single largest install base for Red Hat Linux. I'm their largest customer." (2008)

This is pretty much what I had figured. I'm not exactly new to this, and I figured that in some way the military-industrial/corporate/intelligence complex was in control of Red Hat and Linux. [...] But I didn't expect it to be stated so plainly. Any fool should realize that "biggest customer" doesn't mean tallest or widest, it means the most money. IOW, most of Red Hat's money comes from the military - they have first say in its development. And the connection between the military and spying agencies, etc. should be obvious.

Next, a reader posted this FOSDEM: NSA Operation ORCHESTRA Annual Status Report. Well worth watching in its entirety (including the Q&A at the end), to me this turned out to be a road-map detailing how Red Hat is operating on Linux!

There's a Device Driver Environment that emulates parts of Linux as calls to other servers and Mach. Slides 22-25 have a bit of info on the port from running inside Mach to userspace.

You've made me ruin my moderation in this thread, but I can't let such wrong statements unreplied.

The fact that these keywords are pre-processed by a special compilation step into C++ code does not make the code you actually edit standard C++.

Wrong. Is not a special compilation step. Is the classic C preprocessor, which is as standard C++ as any other feature of the language. Does this mean that udev is not standard C because it defines a foreach with a macro?

Also, Qt has its own notions of strings and files and threads and what-have-you. Once Qt is in your code, you ain't getting it out.

Qt has its own notion of string, because till C++11 there was no string type that allowed Unicode. Likewise for threads. Besides, QThread has features to integrate with an event loop, notion that the standard library doesn't have.

How the hell were programs written with WxWidgets using threads? Relying on Windows POSIX capabilities? Seriously.

And don't even try again the "but Qt duplicates all the containers". Qt's containers use a very different implementation (e.g. with implicit sharing), and so have pros and cons against STL containers. And Qt's containers have compatibility APIs with the STL ones as well. And you are not forced to use them at all. If some part of the API exposes a Qt container, you can convert to and from STL, since such functions are provided.

The C++ standard library is now much better than it used to be, but Qt started in an age where the STL wasn't even an acceptable option in all the environments where it had to run.

Once Qt is in your code, you ain't getting it out.

Certainly not. People is migrating from VxWidgets (e.g. VLC) to Qt, and not the other way around. Why it might be? Maybe is because is such a good application framework that is convenient to use, even for non-graphical applications.

A well-tainted EFI removes the need for backdoors in higher privilege level software.

Another important thing to realize about EFI is that it also contemplates enabling chipset features that will trap certain OS operations to an EFI-based control system running in System Management Mode. In other words, under EFI, there is no guarantee that the OS owns the platform.

Wayland is Linux specific because...

One of the things that went wrong with X was that we tried to pull too much of the OS into X so that we could run on every old platform out there. Or to put it more bluntly, bending over backwards for fringe platforms
He seems to forget that Linux was once a "fringe platform". Sigh.
https://archive.fosdem.org/2012/interview/kristian-hogsberg

Speed an issue? You're thinking Mach. It has rained since then.

Here's some facts:
https://archive.fosdem.org/2012/schedule/event/549/96_Martin_Decky-Microkernel_Overhead.pdf

On top of using the archaic and slow Mach and having failed on attempts to move past that, HURD's an hybrid system, not a pure microkernel system. They're running their drivers in kernelspace.

Ironically, there's a free hybrid system much younger than the HURD which already has USB and AHCI: https://www.haiku-os.org/

To get a feel of how nasty Mach is, I recommend grabbing the slides from this talk:
https://archive.fosdem.org/2012/schedule/event/microkernel_overhead.html

Here's three actually free interesting microkernel and multiserver systems with a pure microkernel architecture (drivers are isolated) which are actively developed and have reached major milestones recently:
Genode: http://genode.org/
HelenOS: http://www.helenos.org/
Minix3: http://www.minix3.org/

Any of them three is more interesting than the HURD. Moreover, they mostly have support for AHCI and USB and run on more than just 32bit x86.

This year's FOSDEM in Bruxelles had over 2400 unique MAC addresses and 3600 visitors a day(source). We enjoyed a 1Gbps pipe, and far from saturated it.

It was overall of excellent quality, though there was a glitch in at least one of the hacker rooms where the operators had to upgrade the AP firmware. The geographic setup was more broken out: FOSDEM happens at the Universite Libre de Belgique (how appropriate), with talks in lots of classrooms spread across a few buildings.

It would be useful for everyone if they could post a writeup of their infrastructure.

Here is a photo of Lance Davis (not the baseball player).

If you like C++ and the Qt API and you want to develop for the web (true web 2.0 AJAX apps), you should try Wt.

Wt clones the Qt API but using Boost instead of Qt. You can compile your web application to a FastCGI module (which you can deploy with Apache, lighttpd, IIS, etc) or to an executable which includes an embedded HTTP(S) web server.

Oh, and there are Ruby bindings, too (code)

Oh, and best of all: you can link to any C and C++ library (including Qt). No more messing with Ruby/Python/PHP/whatever bindings!

The BIOS. The BIOS is pretty much the sole reason PCs take so long to boot.

Regarding Coreboot (was: LinuxBIOS):

The Linux BIOS replaces the normal BIOS found on PCs and other machines. The BIOS boot and setup is eliminated and replaced by a very simple initialization phase, followed by a gunzip of a Linux kernel. The Linux kernel is then started and from there on the boot proceeds as normal. Amongst many other things, it provides a very fast boot time: 3 seconds from power-on to Linux console

It doesn't have to be slow.

Wow, that article on the French is an evidence-free zone. The only actual French OSS project they mention is some middleware doodah that I've never even heard of. Trying to think of some myself... um:

1. Mandrake
2. ...er ...
3. ... that's it.

I'm sure there are others but none springs to mind.

Actually it's Mandriva. Using Mandrake is no more allowed, because of Mandrake the magician ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandriva_Linux#Name_changes )

Well Mandriva is just an example of software tagged "French" (not by Mandriva itself, but it's often referred as "French distro" or something).
As you guessed, we can find some other examples of software started by french people (videolan, Xfce, azureus, libcaca, sympa, frozen-bubble[2] etc.).

But is it important ? Is Mandriva really a French distro ? Mandriva now owns Conectiva (from Brazil) and Lycoris (from USA). So it's more 50% French, 25% US and 25% Brazilian. But wait it's using a kernel started by a Finnish guy, and a Desktop Environment born in (and still hugdely attached to) Germany...
You know were i'm heading. I don't think counting the number or "French OSS projects" is a good measure of how much France is involved or not in FLOSS. Perhaps we can find more valuables way to measure it. For instance by finding some projects where French people are really involved :

• Gnome :
  • http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/random/GnomeWorldWideHuge.jpg (I agree, we don't see much here. Just a bunch of points somewhere in West Europa)
• KDE :
  • http://worldwide.kde.org/pics/fullmap.jpeg
  • http://commit-digest.org/mappy/?view=2008-08-17&scheme=map_default&region=world&mode=embedded&standalone=no
• Debian
  • http://www.debian.org/devel/developers.loc (Same remark as Gnome)

We can also looks at studies and statistics :

• http://www.infonomics.nl/FLOSS/report/Final-2b.htm#_Toc14094379
• http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-9992379-16.html

This part was only about FLOSS development, we could also study FLOSS use or lots of different things. Well, i think my post is long enough already (sorry when i start, i just can't stop) so i won't cover all this. One last thing : I have no clue about other countries, but there is a lot of movement around FLOSS : Events :

• RMLL/LSM (Libre Software Meeting) : http://2008.rmll.info/?lang=en
• Paris Capitale du Libre (Paris http://en.paris-libre.org/index.php?option=com_frontpage&task=&id=0&Itemid=1
• Solutions Linux : http://www.solutionslinux.fr/
• FOSSDEM http://fosdem.org/ (That's true i lied again, it's not in France, but in Belgium. In Brussels, the French speaking part of Belgium)

There are also powerful Associations and usersgroups like April ( http://april.org/index.html.en )
Well April is Involved in so many things (promotion of FLOSS, lobyying, meetings with politics, action groups against tying, against treacherous computing, against software patents, against OOXML normalizat

Who is Wieers?
  What did Shuttleworth propose?
 
Why he would propose it is sort of the point. RTFA.
 
I don't think it is a big stink. In fact it seems a rather well thought out bit of analysis.

klik2 !

Don't forget FOSDEM!

Nature Magazine has a cautious news story lauding the OLPC while pointing out what nay sayers observe. One concern is that the way they are achieving the price point is to push the marketing, distribution, and maintenence cost onto the buyers (the governements) and that they need to reach scale quickly, which while it probably will happen governments are demurring. If this roll out is a success it may be a big shot in arm convincing the hesitant governments. Perhaps the easiest places to get support will be one-man governments; Would-be "populist" quasi-dictators like Qudaffi is a prime candidate for a large purchase.

There's also an interesting interview with Ron Minnich of LinuxBios, who points out that the OLPC will be a major roll out for OLPC in end user hands (rather than embeds). He says that LinuxBios enables such insanely better power management than traditional bios that it's going to knock everyone's socks off. It will wake instantaneously and conserve power.

Even when operating this thing is miserly: 2 watts.

One of the suggested alternatives in the Nature Article put forward by a prominent nay sayer in India (who will not be going forward with OLPC) are that set-top style web-based apps are a better idea. I Don't actually see how. All the set top boxes currently are more expensive, don't have a screen, the screen will be too far away for it's resolution, and they don't have Key boards. So the OLPC looks pretty good.

The OLPC will automatically detect networks. I wonder if Ron Minnich managed to slide in his other project which is BPROC/Clustermatic which is used at Labs like Los Alamos to create high performance self configuring clusters with minimal cluster operating system overhead. Such a system could provide some incredible computing horsepower despite the low performance of the individual nodes.

Another thing I wonder about is printers. In the developed world anyone who can afford a computer can afford or get access to a printer so paper has never really been factored out of computing. INdeed computers if anything, are an organized way to generate more not less paper docs. In the countries using OLPC, printers won't be available. We may see the rise of paperless computing finally.

I googled in my memory.

At last FOSDEM, Jim Gettys gave a presentation of the technical specs of OLPC's XO-1 machine. I remember I found the part about the low-voltage sunlight readable display particularly impressive for a $135 device.

OLPC XO-1 manifacturer Quanta announced selling a XO-like device on the open market later this year, at a price around $200. Presumably it will have a display of the same technology.

Well ... it seems that the Fedora team (and Board Chairman) do not seem to share your opinion of CentOS (they must not have gotten the memo to hate CentOS before we shared a FOSDEM 2007 devroom). Also see:

LinuxFormat Article

I'm sure that Red Hat would be much better off if the people who want to install a free server did not install CentOS (which can easily run anything on RHEL later if support and a paid for OS is required) ... but instead used debian or ubuntu. Of course they wouldn't ... Red Hat benefits greatly because CentOS gets software installed that can easily move to their flag ship product when and if the time is right.

Also, take a look at the Red Hat bugzilla sometime and do a search for CentOS. The code base gets seen / installed by many more people on many more pieces of hardware, many of which would not have installed on RHEL but some other free OS if CentOS were unavailable. This allows RH to get feedback and bug reports from many more people to stablize their codebase. All the time, RH does not need to provide any real support to this group of people.

You can even argue that because of the popularity of CentOS combined with some big name 3rd party repositories like RPMForge and KBS CentOS Extras that a whole new need was demonstrated, and that the EPEL project was created to help fill that need. Again, Red Hat and RHEL users benefit greatly because of this colaboration.

There are other numerous advantages as well ... but that is enough for now. No, Red Hat is not loosing sleep because CentOS exists ... indeed, quite the opposite.

Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal and the President of the Association, announced the Association on Drupal.org today.

GNU, Sun, Debian, Fedora, etc will have a party (serious collaboration effort) at Fosdem this year. Looks like it will be an interesting event. And Sun is a sponsor this year and will have Simon Phipps from Sun speaking on GPL Java

Then again, the P in LAMP has always been about the scripting language, not the database.

Yesterday I was watching Jeff Waugh's presentation at FOSDEM. It was pretty interesting and included his take on LAMP:

-L-inux
-A-pache
-M-ost of our scripting languages start with P
-P-ostgreSQL

Google admitted that it was having difficulties recruiting developers and would be targeting students and engineers.

I've just been to both linux.conf.au and FOSDEM and in both cases, Google has been recruiting really aggressively. By that, I mean someone you've never met just popping in with "Hello, have you considered working for Google?".

Harald Welte did a very interesting presentation about GPL Enforcement in Germany at FOSDEM two weeks ago.

He is one of the few, with Theo de Raadt, who really fight against proprietary software. See this Kerneltrap.org feature about OpenBSD fight against closed source drivers for wireless.

Harald Welte did a very interesting presentation about GPL Enforcement in Germany at FOSDEM two weeks ago.

He is one of the few, with Theo de Raadt, who really fight against proprietary software. See this Kerneltrap.org feature about OpenBSD fight against closed source drivers for wireless.

This reminds me, next month is FOSDEM (Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting) in Brussels: http://www.fosdem.org. I suggest we raid the EU headquarters and talk some sense into the EU ministers.

If you're an open-source developer, you should know what FOSDEM is : the only OSS event which is not commercial and dedicated to developers ! Just check the previous editions for 2004 and 2003 to have an idea.

If you're an open-source developer, you should know what FOSDEM is : the only OSS event which is not commercial and dedicated to developers ! Just check the previous editions for 2004 and 2003 to have an idea.

Had you actually bothered to follow the link, you would've seen it immediately.

The main content on http://www.fosdem.org/, linked above, starts like:

"Welcome to the FOSDEM 2005 site !

The fifth Free and Open source Software Developer's European Meeting (...)"

Now. There.

Yes, there are awards for creators of free software. Look for an announcement of the 2003 winner of the "FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software" at FOSDEM, Feb 21-22.

For those who are interested (and happen to be in Brussels on October 21), Robert Love is one of the speakers at FOSDEM 2004.
He will talk about "The Linux kernel and the desktop".

FSF have the "Award for the Advancement of Free Software". The award ceremony has been at FOSDEM for the last 3 years, not sure where it was held before that.

Previous winners were: Lawrence Lessig, Guido van Rossum, Brian Paul, Miguel de Icaza, and Larry Wall.

The mozilla developers will have a get together: http://eu.mozdev.org/Brussels2003/schedule.html

And here is the schedule for the PostgreSQL talks http://candle.pha.pa.us/fosdem/

If you are interested in Embedded devices you might find the following interesting: http://www.fosdem.org/index/dev_room/dev_room_embe dded

Until Friday you have the opportunity to send your key to the organizer of the key signing event; to the event you have to bring your I.D. card or passport as well as a print of your key's fingerprint.