fosdem 2008

I don't know how many attended fosdem 2008 but it had to be in the thousands. All the sessions were packed, every room filled, and the hallways, where the stands were, were jammed during the breaks. It was, without question, one of the best conferences I've been lucky to attend, and I'm glad that OpenOffice.org had such a strong presence there this year. Next year, am sure, we'll have an even stronger presence. Certainly, we'll have the audience for it, if this year was any measure.

The only sad thing: I never had time to actually attend any of the talks and sessions I wanted to go to. Instead, I met many I had wanted to meet up with and otherwise helped out Sophie G. and Leon M. at the stand. My thanks to them: They set up and manned the booth all day Saturday and, in Sophia's case, Sunday. We gave out hundreds of brochures Frank P. and Stella had created (and Jürgen had printed up) and probably over a hundred t-shirts. And we could have given away many times more that number, I am sure, as our DevRoom was in the AW building, and not the obvious main building, where the food was and Mozilla was.

Mozilla was celebrating its 10th, and I learned that Sophie had been working on it since its start. I hadn't known this. Here, I've been working with Sophie for something like 7 years (!) and turns out that she had already a long history with Mozilla--and no doubt other projects.

But the most interesting story at fosdem (that I heard) is probably Leon's, and it has little to do with Foss. Leon looks like a sailor, or so I believe--he has a the look and robust dishevelledness I associate with long-time seamen, and it turns out that he was, for many years, a navigator on a freighter. These were no small jaunts--his longest trip was 53 days, around the Cape of Good Hope. That's a very long time indeed to spend on a ship, not to touch land, not to eat fresh food, not to stop. There were more stories, and Leon told us some, but I wish he'd told us more. We were at Restobière, having a wonderful classic Belgian dinner and had tried what really was, as he had promised, the world's best beer (dark and rich and yet not sweet but complex, like a very fine wine), plus some remarkable lambic beers whose astringent yeastiness was amazingly good, and were discussing code, procedures, and the usual.

But how did Leon enter gain entry into OOo? No clear answer--it differs for all volunteers, anyway--but I think it had to do with his character--independent and fearless, confident in his ability to solve any problem, but by no means hostile to community. I asked him if he had, after 53 days, hated his shipmates. No, he said, not at all; the opposite. And that's a revelatory statement. For OOo and Foss, in general, require toleration and the ability to get along with those who may irk you because you believe that it's necessary, that otherwise, if you fight, if you let quarrels destroy the effort, the ship will founder, the project will succumb, and there are always sharks.

I'll try to post the fosdem talks we gave as soon as I can. They were good!