Re: FOSDEM 2008 Wrapup

[Gerold Rupprecht]

Thanks Nikolaus for your update.

I am currently recovering from gastrointestinal flu...

My FOSDEM notes...

I unfortunately arrived late at the SUN hotel (around 11:30 pm Friday-
I had to wait for Axel Beckert (Debian project) to finish handling a
last minute production problem at the University before we could get
back on the road (my apologies Fred and Nikolaus).

The hotel had a water pipe burst so my room was not to be. I was sent
to the Hotel de France near the gare de Midi. The window was wide open
and the room stank of mildew. I opened the bathroom door and I almost
fell over...

I ended up staying at the most expensive single bed in Brussels as
there were no places elsewhere at 2:30 in the morning when I decided
it was best to get some sleep.

I was at the N&H Hotel at 8:45 Saturday morning and was able to get a
single room in the same hotel as Axel Beckert, at a much more
reasonable price (69 EUR). Breakfast was good, all you can eat. The
room and bathroom were spotless and well taken care of. I can
definitely reccommend this hotel for next year.

I think they also have some conference rooms, and we can ask about
their breakfast room. They do charge for thier internet connection,
but it may be negotiable...

Saturday, I was the first person on the booth, and set up my desktop
machine and flat screen.

I then worked to get the startup script working on GNUstep. I found a
problem with a couple of dependancies when starting from a bare Debian
sid system (request logged on savannah). Thanks to Richard and Nicola
for their help to get me started.

I later downloaded the GORM application, built and installed it. I
found the excellent demo (older version) of GORM on our website, so I
left this running, as well as iceweasel with tabs open to
wiki.gnustep.org and www.gnustep.org.

I was amazed by the reception given for the embedded devices, and the
speed the brochures were picked up. A number of persons came by the
booth to enter into longer discussions.

The heaviest traffic was on Saturday.

We had a visit to the booth by Rob Savoye,  (
http://www.openmedianow.org/) who was looking at us for interest in
his Gnash (Flash replacement project). He is the atypical American
cowboy, who was one of the first employees with Cygwin and hacked on
the Objective C parts of GCC. He also won a lawsuit with Apple to open
up their changes to GCC due to the GPL licence many years ago.

One of the persons obstructing the situation at Apple had been one of
his ex-employees. In any case, thanks to his efforts over the years,
we have a much better series of compiler and debugging tools (GDB).

He also is looking for cross platform development tools and of course
new developers and financing. I hope we see him getting more involved
with GNUstep. The current discussion around compilers might be more
rewarding if he joined the loop.

His project is also targetting numerous embedded devices, so he was
quite pleasantly surprised by all the devices Nikolaus was showing
running GNUstep (mySTEP).

He later came around to speak with Richard Firth-MacDonald on some
technical details regarding the runtime and debugging techniques.

Nicola Pero had some developers come over from the OpenOffice
development team. They are looking for alternatives to easier maintain
their multiplatform code base. Hopefully we will seem them joining our
community. Maybe Mr. Schwartz (Sun's CEO) will also look again to see
if he can free the Lighthouse Design code from the 1990's.

Fred Kiefer had earlier scouted out the neighborhood near the SUN
hotel (Saint Boniface) where we found a very good Thai and Vietnamese
restaurant. Thanks Fred.

Sunday was again heavy morning traffic where we again distributed alot
of brochures. I went to the FOSDEM keysigning party, and then later
helped out improvising for Nikolaus at the embedded devices dev room.
We got lots of questions and comments from the audience during the
session. The smallest device a person was working on was 32MB. Most
were working with 128 MB devices. This makes GNUstep, even though it
has not had too much tuning done still very competitive. Some of these
devices do not have floating point support, but the bar is being
raised continuously.

The Open Moku phone was the big hit with Nikolaus's demo of updating
his project, cross compiling and then downloading to the machine. He
also wowed them by reexporting the display back to his Mac notebook,
so we could see the application on the overhead projector.

Nikolaus talked (in hushed tones) about some of his constraints such
as particular kernels and compiler combinations to assure a wide cross
platform compatibility. This of course is a moving target for almost
everyone present.

Nicolas Roard took a few photos in the late afternoon Sunday of the
booth.

I got the impression more visitors were present again than last year.
Thanks Lars for bringing the network switch for the booth, Quentin for
the posters, and Nikolaus for printing up all the material with his
colour printer.

We definitely need to do something to reduce the draft of the air
vents around the tables for next year.

Thanks to all the participants and hope to have an even better FOSDEM
next year.

Best wishes,

Gerold

-- 
Gerold Rupprecht
10 rue Louis-Curval
CH-1206 Geneva
Switzerland

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