Fosdem: A Festival of Free
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Freed to Run, Examine, Share
The basic freedoms that define free software are thus: the freedom to run a program for any purpose; the freedom to examine that program, to pick it apart and to put it back together again in a way that suits you; and the freedom to share those changes. What this means is that code is not squirreled away for commercial profit. Instead, it is shared across geographical boundaries, among communities, open to anyone who feels they have a useful contribution to make, be they in Marseilles, France, or Macclesfield, UK.
However, sometimes it’s nice for everybody to get together and have a chinwag. Entry to Fosdem is free. Donations and sponsorship this year from O’Reilly, Novell and Sun, among others cover incidental costs. The venue, the Free University of Brussels, is given over to Fosdem for nothing. It is an excellent space for such a conference.
Each classroom is dedicated to a different project, making sure developers get the most out of their time. Meanwhile, the corridors buzz with stalls promoting initiatives or showcasing recent developments in established systems, including such graphical interfaces as KDE (K Desktop Environment) or Gnome that make Linux attractive to non-techie users.
Free Software, Free Beer
What struck me most about Fosdem was that, even though the delegates and decorations may have looked somewhat disheveled, it is organized with pinpoint precision. Strict rules apply: all speakers must attend the talk that precedes theirs, no recruiting except in designated areas, no talks that are not directly about free software. A group of civil liberties campaigners, never too far from the free software crowd, circumvented this last rule by congregating in the sunshine outside.
In corners all around the conference, you could see people meeting in person for the first time. The conviviality increased on the evening of the first day, when the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure the grassroots movement that campaigned and won against patents in software some years back hosted an evening of serious beer-drinking in the center of town. Well, free software might be why we were all there, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t enjoy free beer, too.
