I'm back from FOSDEM, and very happy.

I've seen very interesting presentations (mostly spent time in the Research Room... and I've reported on that in my professional blog in more details), and met great people.

Compared to previous editions, this year was really great, and really crowdy, with many many "important" developpers having made the trip to Brussels.

There are probably many things I'll forget to tell you about, but let's try and list what I remember.

I was glad to escape the research room to be able to attend the OpenSync presentation by Daniel Gollub (which I unfortunately didn't achieve to to do for the OpenMoko presentation which was REALLY overcrowded : real hot topic ;). Anyway, Daniel is a really nice person, and his presentation was very interesting. I've had the chance to talk to him after the presentation, and tried and give some feedback on my experience as trying to hack a little bit on OpenSync. I now have to test and see if the issues I had before are still there with the recent release, and try and report the problems, and hopefully improve the docs.

I also met Marcin (Hrw) Juszkiewicz after Daniel's talk, as he also had some experience to report (see Marcin's report on his first FOSDEM here, btw). Marcin told me that unfortunately, OpenZaurus seems like dead now... :( ... maybe we have some hope that the Angstrom project will be a way to keep some software useable for the Zauri... we'll see. Anyway, I think now that Sharp stopped the product line, we have to look for more supportive companies to play with our gadgets and Linux and libre software, like Nokia (with maemo) or FIC (and openmoko).

I've been impressed also by the keynote from Simon Phipps about the Java being liberated under the GPL (and also Sun's policy about patents). It's really amazing to see such presentations, compared to what used to be the situation with Java and libre software for years... and the Stallman and Moglen clips were great moments of pure corporate-supported marketing ;)... anyway Sun is now a patron of the FSF, and that's very good (I should note that Sun also became a member of APRIL before that, so for once we were faster than the FSF ;).

I'm also very pleased to have met other people like some Debian developpers like Amaya or Lucas Nussbaum (forgive me others that I've forgotten ;). Amaya helped a lot pushing some NMUs for the twiki package in Debian, that were necessary for us in PicoForge.

Well, there are many more things to say that I forget, but that will be for next time.