LinuxTag in Berlin is over now and I think it was a great event. There is so much diverse and interesting stuff happening in the free software scene and the conference did a very good job at showing this clearly.
This year I was speaker (slides) as well as helper for the OpenEmbedded booth. From my personal rating my talks did not went so well. It would have been easy for me to cope with a slight fatigue, the technical problems (my Fedora9-powered iBook refused to detect the beamer connection, Sebastian's laptop could only show a clipped part of the slides) and do the talk in my mother's language. However I insist on being international-friendly (I would not like attending a foreign conference and have only talks in a language I do not understand.) and therefore did it in English. Well, that is the part where I have to try harder. :-)
Sebastian and me really missed Guillaume from MIDPath fame! It would have been a great opportunity to show everyone the really cool advancements of his project. Unfortunately work interferred and made him cancel the talk. Later we decided that I will jump in and present his slides so there would be no gap in the program. This did not went so well either: The MIDPath talk was 2 hours after mine and fatigue increased. Additionally it became clear that I am not so versed with all those J2ME technologies. Well, anyone who is interested in the project should not base his/her opinion on my presentation abilities but get in contact with Guillaume and the project's subversion repository. :)
On the other hand I think my booth attendance went very good. There where a lot of people showing up and asking questions. I find it much more easy to give answers that way (regardless of language).
An exciting happening for me was to meet and talk to Rob Savoye. He is currently developing Gnash and was one of the founding members of Cygnus Support. Cygnus was the first company making money from selling support services for free software and for this they (Rob and everyone else at Cygnus) are my personal heroes. They made this business model acceptable and I am convinced that their activities made my (and many others') free software job today possible. For this I am very thankful!
The companies' founding was in 1987 and still today you find people in the FOSS movement who confuse free software and earning money. I also like Cygnus' slogans: "We make free software affordable", "If its not source, its not software". So great! And remember that those slogans where coined before Linux was developed.
Oh yes, I really enjoyed talking to Rob. There are people who have less coding skills and experience than him and appear snobbish or affected. Not so with Rob. I felt being treated very kind regardless of me having difficulties with language again. :-D
What was also great that I together with Mario Behling had the chance to make an interview with Harald 'LaForge' Welte of gpl-violations.org and netfilter/iptables fame. We talked about the former project and company attitude towards the GNU GPL. I hope that with the publication of the interview more people get to know about Harald's (and the Freedom Taskforce's) work.
In my opinion free software developers should have a basic understanding of copyright, license requirements (share-alike/copyleft) and know the difference between copyright and patent law (bonus points if you also grok trademark law). You can learn all this from websites, Wikipedia and by reading Larry Lessig's 'Free Culture'. As such it only costs time and dedication and among other things tremendously helps making non-gossip comments over things happening at debian-legal. ;-)
This blog post is becoming to long and I have not talked about all the topics that interested me. Tomorrow I will write about who else I met at LinuxTag and those really cool things in the embedded free software scene I can't keep my mouth shut any longer. :-)