Home >ReactOS News >News #50: FOSDEM Writeup
2009-02-23, Z98
FOSDEM Writeup
The view of one developer at FOSDEM
The following is a writeup by KJK::Hyperion detailing his experiences at FOSDEM. Since all the developers unilaterally agreed that it was a much more entertaining read, it now represents the project's writeup. Besides some minor spelling corrections, name corrections, and conclusion, it was all his, quirky grammar included. Enjoy.
FRIDAY
Left home at 3.30 AM. My pessimistic estimate is 10 hours total of travel from home (Milan, Italy) to hotel (Brussels, Belgium). The pessimistic estimate proves correct: I finally meet Aleksey (Fireball) and his brother Vladimir (turns out "older brother" wasn't actually a coded euphemism for "KGB mentor") at the hotel's front desk at around 1.30 PM. The only viable place to have lunch seems to be the Italian restaurant across the street. Just great: ten hours of travel to find myself eating Italian food, to the sound of Italian music, surrounded by Italian-speakers.
In the afternoon, Stefan, Andrew and Andrew's girlfriend (Stefan100, silverblade and Starflow) get to the hotel. By the time we have all unpacked, rested, showered etc. it's time to go have dinner. But first, we plan to attend the FOSDEM Beer Event, held at the Delirium Café. On the way to the Beer Event (which, despite the best efforts of Fireball's GPS navigator, we eventually reach) we pass through a square surrounded by beautiful historical buildings, among which the Big Pointy Building. If only we had a camera on us.
The Beer Event is way too crowded and Fireball can't find the one person he knows (a Russian member of the Mozilla project), so we give up on it and go look for someplace to eat dinner instead. We look around and realize we are in the middle of a complex and inescapable net of tourist trap restaurants. We are repeatedly harassed by restaurant owners until we finally cave in and enter a place we passed in front of no fewer than three times. A waiter with a smile like an axe murderer's leads us to a table upstairs.
The dinner is good, although we try not to think too hard about what, exactly, the various "special sauces" (the waiter's catch-all term for explaining any dish to foreigners, apparently) are made of. Brussels is otherwise much more expensive than I'm used to, but I have to say seafood dinners are pretty affordable. On the way back to the hotel, Stefan100 feels hungry again and goes to a nearby Pizza Hut. Having taken the unofficial role of Stefan100's big brother, I follow him, no matter how appalling I find his tastes in food.
Back at the hotel room, Stefan100 lectures me on how awesome "Left 4 Dead" is. Somehow, the topic eventually shifts to biology, genetics, evolution, and we chat ourselves to sleep speculating on the meaning of prions and ensuring we'll inevitably sleep through the alarm clock and be late for FOSDEM.
SATURDAY
Me and Stefan100 sleep through the alarm clock and are late for FOSDEM, while Fireball, silverblade and Starflow hurry there and leave us at the hotel. I fill up at the breakfast buffet (bacon and eggs and sausages!). Stefan100 exceeds my expectations once again, breakfasting on microwaved Pizza Hut leftovers. After breakfast, we take the wrong bus because the stop is closer than the right one, at the penalty of a longer walk from the final stop to the FOSDEM. I still have no idea what the FOSDEM is.
Turns out the FOSDEM is a combination conference/expo held in a building of an university. We go in looking for the ReactOS table, and we cross paths with Starflow giving out fliers. She directs us to another building across the street. There, away from the mainstream and the TV crews, developer-oriented talks are held, and the unluckier projects have their tables. There, as further away from the entrance as possible, we share a table with Haiku and Syllable. I dub the table the "Alternative OS Ghetto", to Stefan100's amusement. We disrobe and unpack, and get to work. Still missing is Colin Finck, who will only join us in the afternoon and is technically the only person who can legally take money donations (we have a donation box).
We finally have a reliable graphic designer (Starflow) in our team, and it shows. We have fliers, pin buttons, stickers, business cards and badges, and Lightscribe-printed demo disks. No business cards for me, because I objected to the design (in my defense, they looked very silly on screen). A blank badge, too, because my "nickname only, ever" policy was too ambiguous; no problem, I improvise one with a ballpoint pen, awarding myself with the "Badge Improviser" title.
All arrangements made, it's time for the good old salesman routine. This year I'm kind of dressing the part, too, with a cheap pinstriped suit jacket over a tattoo print gray shirt (no tie) and faded jeans (total budget: less than €200). It turns out we're selling ice to eskimos, so to speak, because most visitors stop at the table to say hello, they already know the project, they already downloaded 0.3.8, keep up the good job guys etc. I collect a couple business cards, lacking my own to give away and making sure I'll forget to call them back in a reasonable timespan (I succeeded). I collect some good criticism too, on how we shouldn't expect to defeat Windows head-on, and should maybe concentrate on niches instead, like embedded devices or netbooks (tell me something new!). Among the hardest sells, a PostgreSQL guy who decides he's not going to be fooled by my magnificent pinstriped suit and all but wishes we'd fail, but some tag-teaming with Fireball and personal contact warms him up a bit.
Fireball is pretty much perfect at stand duty, he's friendly and warm and knows a lot of people. Starflow sadly but surely acts as our hormonal flytrap: guys stop to talk to her, and they get redirected to a hairy Italian in a cheap suit when their questions get too technical. Me, I'm afraid I come across as a two-bit bullshitter, but at least I try to talk to everyone. But too many times we let visitors have a look at our table and go away without engaging in discussion or at least unloading some freebies on them.
We really need to train our team on proper expo behavior, or give everyone something to do. For example, I think we should have applied for giving speeches: in my experience, that generates a lot of attention, making the project more "real" to people, and it would have given our team something else to do than the tedious grind of stand duty. Stefan100, for example, is always aching to talk technical details with other developers. Luckily, an old acquaintance of the project since LinuxWorld Expo 2004 stops by our table, and Stefan100 can drown him in questions on interrupt handlers and the relative merits of user-mode buffer handling models.
A particularly low point of the FOSDEM is lunch. Lunch means either vending machines or a hot dog pedlar just outdoors. A high point is the large amount of quality free swag being given out by the larger projects: I load up on Mozilla pin buttons (including a rare and beautiful "RSS icon" button). Another high point should be the talks held by prominent members of each project, but I can't bring myself to forego stand duty. But the best part is, undoubtably, the quantity and quality of the people you meet.
We meet our alternative OS ghetto neighbour and long time expo buddy mmu_man from Haiku. We meet Leslie Hawthorn from Google Summer of Code, who is extra-friendly to us despite the fact ReactOS has been virtually banned from GSoC for the past three years. We meet the Free Software Foundation Europe people, who speak a little dismissively of their hippie American counterparts and seem really OK guys all-around. We are given a dinosaur quiz by two KDE guys, and we rank second overall (after
Mozilla), earning ourselves a donation. I meet bonsaikitten from Gentoo, whom I knew through mutual friend Flameeyes of Gentoo/FreeBSD, and ask him about the status of Gentoo on Interix (the official UNIX subsystem for Windows). He redirects me to Markus Duft, who enthusiastically shows me a stable Windows build of Gentoo happily running on a Windows Server 2003 machine (one day, I swear, that will be a ReactOS machine).
Other than Eike from OpenLabs and Alberto Furia (Straluna) from Debian, whom I knew from OpenDay 2008 and already met at the airport, I meet no less than five separate people from Italy (AUGURI MALA!!!). I don't realize they are Italian and they don't realize I'm Italian, but most ask at some point. Two won't know I was Italian until we find ourselves on the same return flight. Lessons learned: we need a list of spoken languages on our badges.
The day is long and exhausting. Using the Big Pointy Building as a point of reference, we try to trace our way back to the tourist trap district. I demand to dine at a restaurant with a Belgian menu (waffles included). I point out how Brussels has a lot of Italian restaurants. Fireball laments the lack of Russian restaurants anywhere he goes. We finally find ourselves in the middle of the restaurant gauntlet, and start looking around. We immediately come by a restaurant with Russian signs on its outdoor fish display. Our choice is made: we pretty much owe it to Fireball.
Incredibly, the restaurant has a €12 menu, and dessert (waffles!) included for free in all meals. It's a welcome change for me: living in Milan, Italy, you get used to €30 minimum dinners, where you feel they would make you pay for individual toothpicks if they could get away with it. I opt for an à la carte dinner, though. I want to try the onion soup first (I made it once, I want to see if I got it right), and Belgian traditional moules frites next. The waiter seems to cringe at the idea of onion soup and moules frites, but dutifully obliges. Others at the table go for the standard €12 menu, and Stefan100 tries the chicken waterzooi, which turns out to be the same "special sauce" dish I had the night before, but with chicken instead of fish. I happily gorge on a huge bucket of mussels, in an increasingly messier fashion, from removing my jacket, to using my hands instead of the fork, to rolling up my sleeves. Discussing ReactOS while up my elbows in mussels is fun, we should do this again.
Back at the hotel, silverblade and Starflow come visit us with a videocamera for an interview. What they get instead is a real-life version of our IRC channel insanities. Fireball politely declines to take part. I give the rest of the team their obligatory ReactOS Crew T-shirts. We go to bed. Stefan100 is fortunately too tired to rant.
SUNDAY
We meet all together for breakfast (except silverblade and Starflow, who go have breakfast at a fast food). Meanwhile, the FOSDEM table is manned by Pierre Schweitzer (Heis Spiter), who came early and will have to go early. It feels I barely have the time to give him one of the few remaining ReactOS Crew shirts, and he's gone. I have to leave very early myself, as the pessimistic estimate for the return trip demands (the pessimistic estimate will prove, once again, accurate to the minute). It doesn't matter much, as Sunday is a much slower day at FOSDEM (we do get more donations than Saturday, though).
I miss the only talk I was interested in ("When the hell is Thunderbird 3 coming out", or something to that effect). I have a terrible burger and fries lunch.
It was incredibly fun, reaching a critical mass of sorts with so many people from the project meeting at once, but now it's over, and we slowly trickle away.
Stefan100 comes with me. We eventually part ways, as we have to go to different airports. Seems Stefan100 isn't the hugging kind (he sure is the handwaving kind, though).
On the bus trip to the airport, I witness a dramatic farewell scene between a baby-faced couple. The boy gets on the bus last, face streaked by tears. A magic spell of sorts occurs on the bus as it reaches the motorway: simultaneously, the ride gets smoother, the radio fades out and heating kicks in. I swear all passengers fall asleep at once. Maybe the motorway takes a detour through Oz.
At the airport I use a Dyson Airblade for the first time in my life (a hand-dryer that actually works!), I find the biggest paperclip I've ever seen, and I can finally sit down and eat my share of the cookies Starflow made for the team (they are delicious). My people-networking is thwarted once again by my lack of business cards, as I meet two people I already met at FOSDEM and have no way to exchange contacts with them. On the plane I also meet Riccardo Mottola (Grey Gandalf) from GNUStep again, and chat as much as fatigue and sleep deprivation allow.
After a short flight and a long commute, I'm finally home.
Conclusion
The video that Andrew shot at FOSDEM can be viewed in two parts on YouTube. Part 1 is here and part 2 is here. The CD that Andrew brought to FOSDEM was actually a combined LiveCD and install CD, along with the 0.3.8 source code, the build environment, and a preloaded Qemu image. For those that were unable to attend, we will be uploading a copy and linking it here soon.
