FOSDEM was held on February 1st and 2nd in Brussels, Belgium. It was a huge conference with thousands of people. Statistics aren’t kept as the conference is completely free and open, but estimates range from 6k people to 10k people. Nearly everyone there had a technical background. There were numerous awesome talks that ranged all across the board. The atmosphere was very pleasant, very geeky. It was a total geek conference thrown by geeks for geeks.
Soooo many things stood out. The social event at the Delirium Cafe was an absolute blast. I had fun meeting lots of people. There were so many booths with cool things, like live hardware hacking, and Linux running on various SoC boards. The sheer number of Open Source products that had booths in general was astounding. I really liked the stuffed Perl camel. 😉 Belgium is a fun place.
The talks were great. I didn’t get to a whole lot of them, but the PHK talk on the NSA was awesome, the capsicum talk was well done, and the closing ceremony where they described how FOSDEM works and how many people may have attended was also good.
My talk went very well! It was very well-received and everyone loved the ponies! They loved the My Little Pony music I used as well! They ate it up and laughed. There was a full day of just BSD talks, and we had a really good table (3, actually). We actually had our own room! We talked to lots of BSD folks, gave out lots of CDs and exposed lots of folks to PC-BSD, FreeBSD and FreeNAS. Getting the word out about FreeBSD, as well as FreeNAS, to folks who had either not heard of either before or knew very little of it was very rewarding.
John Hixson
Senior Software Developer
