FSCONS`2008
FSCONS, also known as Free Software Conference, has taken its place at IT-University of Gothenburg for the second time! Some of the students (those who are taking Advanced Free Software Tools course) got free passes to all of the events and could get in the nice atmosphere of open-source development and free culture movement.
At the conference we have attended few interesting talks, namely popular Amarok 2 media player talk, Arduino open-source hardware project, Midgard data management framework, Jabber messaging protocol, Qt framework for embedded devices and many others.
The conference is organized by Henrik (aka hesa), who is the lecturer of the ASFT course (and many others…) and also head of FSF Europe (visit his page). The event has vastly expanded since the first time in 2007 as there were twice as many lectures going on. Those were structured in 4 tracks: “free culture”, “development”, “free software” and “interactive” (that featured some hands-on experience). Some of the lecture hosts were not that great speakers but anyhow I enjoyed their talks and had great time.
A bit unrelated but still a fact is the possibility to see latest trends in gadgets as the geeks are the ones who usually buy them first. So I’ve seen a lot of netbooks which confirms the widespread popularity.
Another cool thing was the “free” beer v4.0 (as in speech) brought from Denmark. It is manufactured using a known and open recipe available for you to use. The beer itself is not free since it involves producing but the funny part was the way it has been sold on the conference. Since it’s not legally allowed to bring beer and sell it on the event (at least not easily) it was given away for free but a buyer was required to provide a compulsory donation. For those of you who are not familiar with free speech/free beer concept you are most welcomed to read this page and also this page.
Generally I think it’s really healthy for the growth university to host such events and attract industries because it definitely improves the positioning and image. Looking forward to FSCONS`2009!
Have a look at the conference web page. Some of the talks could be viewed from the provided video streams.
3 years, 10 months, 1 week, 3 days