BSDCan 2015 Recap

Last week the most well-attended BSDCan conference in history took place in Ottawa, Canada, with nearly 300 BSD programmers and hackers in attendance. Several iXsystems staff were present at the conference and shared their thoughts with us on how the conference went.

bsdcan15_mattoMatt Olander with Olivier Cochard-Labbé, the creator of FreeNAS

According to Kris Moore, Director of PC-BSD Software Development, “BSDCan was a treat this year. It was the largest BSDCan ever, with close to 300 people in attendance. (They even had to use an overflow room for the keynote). There were many new sponsors this year, including several that brought people for manning booths.
The Developer Summit was good as well, and probably the largest I’ve ever been to. The vendor summit was also good, with long-time vendor companies coming and talking about working more closely with FreeBSD in the future, to avoid the drift of forking their own OS.

bsdcan15_kenKen Moore hard at work.

The keynote given by Steven Bourne (Inventor of Shell) was fascinating, plus Kirk convinced him to come by and give PC-BSD a whirl. He had installed it before we left and said everything was working well!”
Dru Lavigne, iXsystems’ Technical Documentation Specialist, gave the following recap of the conference:
“This was the largest BSDCan ever with the most presentation tracks (4). Everyone was excited to hear Steve Bourne’s keynote. There were many new attendees this year and many of those were women. The doc sprints were well attended each night and several people learned how to create their first patches and had them committed.
The Foundation raised a lot of money (nearly $3000 total). There was also a cake to celebrate the Foundation’s 15th anniversary. The closing auction included 3 conference T-shirts signed by Steve Bourne, Andy Tanenbaum, Kirk McKusick, and Mike Karels. 10 people participated in the BSDP lab beta and a lot of good data was collected regarding the lab tasks, lab process, and scoring scripts.
As usual, there were many great presentations, conversations, commits, hacking, interviews, etc. going on into the wee hours and very little sleep was had by anyone.”

bsdcan15_finneyMatt Finney at our booth.

Ken Moore, PC-BSD Software Developer, states, “This conference was highly productive both for me as well as for FreeBSD in general. I saw a working version of Skype 4.30 which was getting ready to be pushed into the ports tree, I talked to one of the FreeDesktop/GNOME developers quite a bit and worked out some changes for Lumina to better support the FreeDesktop standards, and he also wants me to attend the next FreeDesktop/XDG meeting where these standards are discussed/created.
I talked with another graphical desktop developer and worked out how to get his desktop (DeforaOS) into PC-BSD/PCDM and I got a lot of additional work/improvements committed to Lumina based on input from many people at the conference. I was also able to give feedback about some particular ports/applications directly to the maintainer, and some of those ports were fixed during the conference (particularly with regard to consistent PulseAudio segmentation faults).

bsdcan15_krisKris Moore at the booth

Based on talks with other developers, I assembled a laundry list of new technologies to test out and implement within PC-BSD/Lumina sometime in the near future, such as:

  • Qt5 websocket/webstreamer framework for allowing our Qt5-based applications to be used as web-based configuration portals.
  • libUCL support/standardization for reading/writing FreeBSD configuration files.
  • DBUS – still determining if this is tech we might want to optionally use/support (mainly for Lumina).
  • Jetpack, Docker, zDocker? All new containerization methods that are now/coming to FreeBSD which we might be able to expose to PC-BSD users within the AppCafe.

Also, my Lumina session went very well. I was expecting almost no interest in the development of a graphical interface at a BSD conference, but I was blown away by all the interest/questions I was getting about it. Around 25-30 people attended the talk, but I was constantly getting stopped/questioned about it by others who could not attend the talk throughout the day (too many good sessions in each slot that people had to choose between). My slides are available online if others who could not attend are interested: http://www.slideshare.net/beanpole135/2015-bsd-canluminade
Overall I think this conference was a big success, and I would highly recommend it. This is a great conference to learn about FreeBSD and its technologies (no matter how much of a power-user you are), and being able to directly talk and work with FreeBSD developers/committers is a fantastic experience.”

bsdcan_johnJohn Hixson and Olivier Cochard-Labbé

For our final recap, we turn to John Hixson, Senior Software Engineer at iXsystems:
“According to Dan, this was the largest BSDCan ever. There were almost 300 people. The devsummit was well attended as well. I went to a lot of good talks on current technologies being worked on in BSD. The keynote by Bourne was awesome. Kirk did a talk on ZFS, Allan Jude did a talk on UCL, Michael Dexter did a talk on virtualization, and Kris did a talk on package management. There were a lot of folks at the hackers lounge each night. We picked up some wireless routers and hacked a serial cable on them and loaded FreeBSD. The social event had great food and a lot of good talks as well. What else is there than to say that BSDCan is awesome!”

Join iX Newsletter

iXsystems values privacy for all visitors. Learn more about how we use cookies and how you can control them by reading our Privacy Policy.
π