FISL 9.0 - Community
Sunday Apr 27, 2008
FISL is always a great experience, if not for the varied program of talks and speakers, then for the incredible community environment. In three days the organization gathered over 7k people to talk, discuss and learn about open source, free software and a huge array of technologies.
Following what PoA-OSUG did last year, the group was out there spreading the word about OpenSolaris to something like 4-500 people over the three days. I had different commitments during the event, so unfortunately I couldn't stay with the group for the whole thing. But I did manage to lose my voice by the end of the first day, alternating between Sun's and the group's booth :)
I eventually chose to stay with the OSUG rather than at Sun's booth because I noticed that a lot of people, usually students, were a bit shy to approach some of us. While the UG folks were constantly flooded with people asking all sorts of questions and had a more open environment.
While over there I talked to students, professors, sysadmins, developers and business folks. We demo'ed DTrace, ZFS, MDB and other basic features and functionalities of the systems. I saw around 10 laptops installing SXDE and helped with some installer and driver issues. One professor from a local private college brought over CS students to do research on Operating Systems, so we ended up beeing interviewed by 4-5 different groups. IT professionals from areas like database, web infra-structure, Java, even a couple of guys from the air force showed up.
What was also very interesting to see were new local companies with products and services based around OSS, more than I recall seeing at last year's. From the BR government (in all of its instances) to the new guys starting their business, OSS has become a big part of the society. Not only generating revenue but being used to drive social changes. Inclusion, freedom of information, education, and source of revenue were all there.
 FISL 9 |  PoA-OSUG |  Sun |  OLPC |
On the last day I went over to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) booth and borrowed one to try to install OpenSolaris 2008.05. Didn't get much luck as it can only boot from EXT2 or JFFS file images. The fact that we could barely get online also didn't help (since the air was saturated for most of the event), but it was worth a shot.
Looking forward to next year's. And if you need yet another reason to be there, the next one will be its 10th edition ;)
|
|
|
|
