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Wednesday February 28, 2007

The Magic of FOSDEM

Before I attended FOSDEM mjw told me that there is magic when people get together that makes distrust disappear.

Here Mark and I are with Simon Phipps answering questions about Classpath and OpenJDK following Simon's keynote. Simon gave a fantastic overview of our work on open sourcing Java as well as several important meta issues such as Sun's role in open source software and the software patent situation in Europe (and the United States).


Photo courtesy of Steph Meslin-Weber (I can't wait to check out all the other great photos from Steph, Mario and Sarah)!

Saturday afternoon was the Classpath Runtime Rumble which included technical presentations from several VM developers about the amazing work they've been doing.

Sunday morning mr led an excellent discussion of our OpenJDK roadmap which included awesome comments, questions and feedback from the audience. I think the sheer size of the OpenJDK project was impressive to many. We learned that there are many meta issues in making an open source project like OpenJDK succeed and fostering collaboration at many levels (technical and social) will be essential for success.

Sunday afternoon Tom Fitzsimmons, Matthias Klose, and I gave introductions to the DevJam. Lively discussion ensued about the role of packaging and how Java can be profoundly integrated with Linux.

And this only skims the surface of the coolness of FOSDEM. I have taken many notes and intend on publishing various slides, pointing to fun photos, documenting the cool ideas we discussed, setting up an OpenJDK packaging Wiki page and even have an idea of an (IRC) nick secret decoder ring. Some people I met at FOSDEM I've been chatting with for nearly 9 months, others I only recently got to know, and some I had never met (online) before. Mark is definitely on to something: seeing everyone face-to-face really solidified our relationships. There are several significant discussions that I will blog about in the coming days. You have all humbled me with your enthusiasm and brilliant insights. In fact we had so much fun that we often ended up enjoying Belgian beer until all hours of the night!

More soon...

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Posted by tmarble ( Feb 28 2007, 10:59:16 PM CST ) Permalink Comments [1]