The first talk I went to was Richard Stallman, talking about software
patents. I've heard that talk before, but there were some
improvements and updates, and the Q&A was very interesting.
There was a camera team recording the whole thing, but I think they
do that every year and no recordings have appeared online after any
of the previous FOSDEMs. Pity. (If you like recordings, FSF have
their own page of
audio/video recordings from other events.)
After him, Pieter Hintjens, current President of FFII, had a 10 minute slot.
Unfortunately, I think many people thought that Pieter was going to
talk for an hour, so some people left at the start of his slot to go
to other talks. He gave a concise
explanation of FFII's work and the direction they're moving in.
After a break, Richard came back to give a presentation on GPLv3. This was
interesting and I think it was his first. It was short and I
recorded it on my digital camera. I'll try to get that online
quickly.
I then met with others from FSFE to plan our [GNU/]LinuxTag
activities. There will a lot of discussion about GPLv3 there, which
is something that we want to encourage and assist.
After this, I learned that FSFE had a 30 minute slot at the end of
the day - but it was a surprise and we hadn't planned anything. Our
quick improvisation was that Georg Greve (Germany), myself
(Ireland), Henrik Sandklef (Sweden), Pablo Machón (Spain), and
Reinhard Mueller (Austria) would each talk for 5 minutes about the
work that we do.
We had 90 minutes to prepare for this together, and then it was onto
the stage. I spoke about my work on EU legislation, assisting the
free software community and movement in the UK & Ireland, and on
my work on GPLv3.
That slot closed the event and so it was time to pack up the stall
materials and arrange dinner plans. We'll all be back in the
morning.
