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Episode: 906
Title: HPR0906: FOSDEM 2012
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0906/hpr0906.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 04:45:42
---
Hey, hey!
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon, and today on Hackerdock Radio, we're going to be
talking to Pastel Blazer of the Fostam free and open source software developers European
meeting, which going to Wikipedia is a non-commercial volunteer organization, organized European
event, set it around free and open source software development. Pastel, how are you? Hi, I'm
fine. Hi, everyone. Are you having a good day today? Oh, busy. I'm in the middle of preparation,
so it's the last stage, until the event happens, so that's always a very busy time of the year,
quite obviously. So, can you tell me what time the event is on, what days it's on? Yeah, so
essentially it's on the 4th and 5th of February and takes place in Brussels, so it's a weekend.
Both days are packed with sessions and talks all the time, and we do have a social event on
Friday evening, which is much appreciated. Actually, I suspect many people to come only
for that purpose, but which is our beer event on Friday. So yeah, it's essentially on the weekend,
and just to give you an idea of how busy it is, it is, we'll probably break the 400 session
barrier this year, I guess, that is packed on two days then. You have 400 concurrent sessions?
No. In total. Oh, we should. So we had 330, 340, I think, past years, but we have a few more rooms
this year, so our guests will be around 400. Yeah.
Craig, that's a lot of conferences, we'll be just happy to have 400 attendees. So how many people
would you expect to attend then? That's an interesting story on its own, because I mean,
entrance is free of charge, and we don't even have a registration system. So basically,
you just show up there, go there, and that's it. That's very nice and very important to us,
but also makes it quite difficult for us to track or have an estimation of the number of people
are there. A very safe estimation is around 5,000 people, is what we guess. Wow. That's a lot of people.
Yeah, it is. Okay. First of all, let's just take a step back here. That's, that's,
adventure is going to be on Friday night, the Saturday and the Sony. So how would somebody get there?
Would it be safe to assume that you get to Brussels Medi and then how do you get out to the event
from there? Oh, our website, actually, this, there's a link on, it's fostham.org. We have a link
with travel information. So it's a good, good part is Brussels is rather easy to go to. So be it
by train, by car, or even by plane, which is also an important point for the conference.
It's very easy to reach at the very least from Europe, but also from overseas.
When you're in Brussels, being from the airport, you can go through Brussels Medi, which is
Sautral, which is pretty much a main train station, and there are several options from there. So it's
something like 15 minutes away by cab. There are buses, trams and many different options,
which are listed on our website. I think it's much easier to just check it out over there than
I see you running a bus service and from the event as well. Yeah, we do that on Saturday morning
and on Sunday afternoon and evening, we rent two large buses, we do non-stop travel from
the venue to the main station. Yeah. So I guess people stay mostly in Saturday afternoon, dude.
Yeah, action. Yeah. Okay. Let's move on to the event itself. How long has it been running?
Depending on which name you take, it's actually the first one was in 2000. So this is going to be
the 12th edition. Well, the first one had a different name, which was just asked them for open
source development meeting, but then the second one was faster, but essentially the first
osdem was in 2000. Yeah. Okay. Have you been involved with this all the time?
I've been involved starting with the fourth one, if I remember correctly. It's been so long.
We were just, I mean, it was just one person all alone, half of the Buddha who did the first one.
It was pretty funny because he didn't actually think that there would be many people showing up,
and he poked many people for speakers and, you know, hope that just a very few would actually
become, but everyone said yes, and 300 people showed up for the first one. So that was a very
good start, and then a few other people joined, but essentially we're, let's say three people doing
all the work before the conference, with obviously many more people present during the event.
And I joined, yeah, I think was a fourth one. So we're four of us doing everything before the
event, and we started expanding and expanding with the options we had at the venue. A very
important point of first them, which is really, very, very, especially in many ways, is that
we actually use a complete campus of university, the university Libre de Brucelle,
it's just, you will be in Brussels, whom very, very kindly put their infrastructure to our
disposal at a very, let's say, a very good price, which makes many, many things possible,
such as, it gives us a luxury of actually being able to pick sponsors.
And also, commercial at all, I understand. Sorry, you're not very commercial at all.
No, not at all, actually. Not that we have a particular dislike of commercial
events, but this is really centered around the community, and as far as funcering goes,
we try to keep the number of sponsors really low and rather go for a long-term,
midterm relationships with those, you know, also to keep our independence. So sponsors
don't get much in return. They get their name on the website and the folder we distribute to
visitors now, that's about it. So they don't get a stand, they don't get vendor talks, etc,
as it is a customer at pretty much any other conference. And we actually, we thank our sponsors
for that as well, because they play, I mean, they're fun with that. And it's also possible,
because I mean, the amount of our expenses are rather low, especially for a conference that
large, and that's mostly possible thanks to the ULB that puts all their infrastructure on the
campus or disposal. Although that's at the, all the events I heard that Cisco sponsored your
networks last year without correct. Yeah. Just because they show that type of sponsorship does
actually work if somebody who hasn't been having a conference new who sponsored your network. So
yeah, we do have a building network team too, though, they have been busy at doing the networking
at Falstown for many, many years, so we try to improve each year. And obviously having a
support of Cisco, who also, I mean, help us around by well lending us three Cisco engineers
during the conference, but it's mostly us organizing everything. And also since last year,
we have a great relationship with the ULB networking team. And I mean, I believe we have the best
network of any conference on the planet. Let me just give my head around the concept of having
400 events that you go to, 400 topics that you can go and visit. How do you even begin to manage that?
So yeah, we have different kind of things of sessions at the conference. First of all,
we have what we call the main tracks, which we have six tracks or topics with three or four
talks in each. And those are speakers that we select and invite. So we put together that schedule,
and that also includes a keynote additionally. And that's one part. So that's a classical,
talk session lecture kind of thing that happened in two of the largest,
two largest rooms we have. One has 1,400 seats, one has 800 seats. And another interesting part is
we do lightning talks, which are probably increasingly popular in many conferences. I think
those are short, 15 minute talks. They're really fun because the speakers are forced to
make a point and be really quick with it. And you get to see a lot of interesting projects in a
short period of time. What we do as well is developer rooms that's arguably the more important part
of the conference actually. So the concept there is that we have something like 15, 16 lecture rooms
that we put at disposal of open source projects. We make a call for their rooms, they apply.
And then we elect. So unfortunately, as we get many, many more requests as we have rooms,
we have to pick. And we give them the rooms. So they make the schedule in there themselves.
It goes on a website, etc. But they arrange the management of the room itself. And we increasingly
will try to, we welcome projects that go together on topics, more and more, rather than individual
topics. So individual projects, because we believe it's very much a collaboration. And
I mean, I mostly see first them as a tool. And I mean, none of us make any financial benefit
from organizing it. But the goal here is to be used as well as possible as a tool. And the big
thing is pretty much everyone is there. So if you don't use it for collaboration and talking with
people and exchanging ideas, I believe you're not making very good use of it. So well, those
dev rooms are developer rooms, many, many projects, Mozilla, Katie, and Ginoom. They're actually together
and across desktop dev room. And we have a virtualization dev room with many projects and all that
kind of stuff. And that that's really a very important part. And that makes, I mean, the biggest
part, obviously, of those 400, but 400 is what my estimation right now, I don't have all the schedules
from the dev rooms yet, but certainly way above 300. So you pretty much have something like
15 to 20 sessions in parallel at all times during the weekend. Fantastic. You do, you have a
fantastic website, but you also have applications that will allow people to select where the talks are.
Yeah, there are applications for Android. And actually it should show up pretty soon in the
market. And I believe there is one for iPhone as well that should be around as well. We still have
to poke the authors to make sure it's there. But yeah, we also provide a booklet that is free to
every visitor that has a complete schedule. It's on a website itself. We also provide a mobile version
of the website, but have to be online for that, although we have a billion Wi-Fi network everywhere.
And I also always hack something that you can print. It's a huge grid of everything, but that
shows up not quite yet. We'll take a few more weeks. Okay. How are the arrangements for the
talks? Are they pretty much nailed down to the stage? The main tracks are actually confirmed now.
So I've put them on the website yesterday. So you can check those out on first and up work.
And just give the listeners a quick rundown. We have the keynotes. Welcome to Post-Tem
rethinking system and district development. Freedom out of the box. Then the future of your
app track beyond traditional mobile links. Yeah, the Linux group kept on coming up. LibraOffice,
Willand, Ondrahypervices. We have Janus. Janus. Virtualization, KVM, Linux, containers,
and OpenVZ, native KVM tools, network and IOTRAC, voice, internet trail. It's one of the
worst of UnixIOs, strategy from certain control group. The system track, CO app.
They're in caching and tuning, core boot, bringing monitoring into the 21st century,
community, community ambence burn, while we're doing long caress and stick. And then
development track, we have a lot of VM, Apache Cassandra, and dev2 ops. So that kind of gives you an
idea of what's going on. Yeah, the main track. And that's the small part of the conference.
So that starts, so I guess what time would one month be there on a Friday evening?
Friday evening, I believe it starts around five or six. And we, well, the theory is,
or in theory, we do have one of the nicest and largest bars of Brussels, just for us, which is
the Delirium Café. Funnily enough, it's actually in the Guinness Book of Records because they have
more than 2,000 beers on their menu. And we have that place just for us on Friday. In practice,
it turns out we have several bars in the street and pretty much get a whole of the whole street
there. It's right in the center of Brussels next to the whole place, for those who know who have
been there or plan going there. Obviously, we do have instructions how to get there on the website.
Yeah, pretty much stars, five, six, gets busy around seven, eight, and I've heard that there are
still people there at five a.m. in the morning. So nice for drinking some choppies.
Beer. Exactly. Very sore head in the morning. I don't think I'll be doing that on the left
or the event at all. Just a bit of caution there. It's Belgian beers. So it's not your regular beer.
So yes, if you are cautious, if you are going to have a beer, it should be a Belgian beer. That's my
motto. Super. We plan to have a table at the event. Could you tell me a little bit about the
other area? We can cover it yet. Right. We do have stands as well. I'm customary at conferences as
well. I believe that the head current will be around 48 stands, tables with many projects
are more than one, obviously. So it's not around 50 projects, but around 30, I think.
There will be split on three main buildings we have, especially for those who have been at
first them. Probably quite a lot already listening to this. We do have a new building,
additionally this year, which pretty much saves our bottoms as far as crowd control goes.
We will actually move out many stands to that location because it just provides a lot more space.
Well, it's pretty bare bones. So we put tables over there and the projects or whatever they want
with it. Now, typically it's showcasing stuff. Obviously, we very much insist that they do
at their open source projects and showcase open source applications in development, obviously.
Yes. But it's very, very nice because you get to meet. That, of course, is true for the whole
conference, but very much for the stands as well. You get to meet the people who do it. So
you're not going to have some marketing folks talking about their marketing folders,
but you're going to talk with the people who actually implement that stuff on a day-to-day basis.
And so that's very, very nice to just hang around and talk with the people over there.
Yeah. Fantastic. One thing that I've heard about Foster and this is my first time going
and we're actually happening at table is that there's so much to do and see that it's very
confusing for people. So do you have any advice for the Foster and you be?
It's certainly the complaint we get to hear most is that there are so many interesting
things to do and see at the same time, obviously you can't attend everything, but that's something
we can live with and that's better than... Well, you don't risk being bored, that's for sure.
Yeah, I think actually you should look at the schedule a few days before the conference,
because then you should, it will be complete and see what your interests are. There are really
many, many things and you can spend a while trying to put together a schedule beforehand.
That should help, because I said there's so much going on. It's a pretty busy weekend,
but on the other hand, the atmosphere is very, very relaxed. It probably doesn't go more relaxed in
this, so everyone you can talk to, just talk to them and don't be shy. And this is really,
I mean, our motto is by the community, for the community. It's really, very relaxed,
everyone's very open. You can talk to anyone, that's really, really nice.
Super, I plan to snatch a few interviews, but I'm down there. So people listen to this,
we'll be having Foster for the whole year, if it's, if it's something I can't really think,
like what you're saying. So I just have a few more more questions. What's your favorite
piece of beer? My favorite piece of beer is the best one in the world. It's a best
veteran. Yes, indeed. That's the holy grail that is extremely difficult to get hold of.
Apart from that one, I'd say triple caramel it.
Yeah, yeah. Not arguing with you on any of these points.
Yes, and I have one last question, which is also very important.
Is it true that if a Dutch person asks for directions in Belgium, they will be sent the wrong way?
I don't know. I'm not Flemish, so I probably don't have the hate of Dutch people that the
Flemish might have. I'm French and German speaking, so I don't know. Maybe asking English,
I don't know. No, I don't think that's going to happen. Super. That's, I mean, Brussels is quite
a cosmopolitan, so most people are French speaking there, but you can get it running with English
very well. I mean, many, many tourists going there as well, so have no fear. It's not an
English-speaking country, but it's not going to be an issue in Brussels at all.
No, it shouldn't be. And the conference itself seems to be an English more or less throughout.
Completely, everything. Well, just for practical reasons. I think two years ago there was one
session that was in French, which was a meeting of the French-speaking Mozilla community that
probably kind of made sense. Yeah, but now everything, everything, 100% is in English, because we
have people at the very least from everywhere all around Europe going there, and even many, many
from the US and Canada. So, yeah, it's completely in English. All the talks are in English. All the
information is in English. Everyone from staff and team speaks English. Yeah. You also have the
LP certification exams as well. Right. Yeah, just put that one online a few minutes ago, actually.
Yes, LPI does exams during the weekend, so there are five sessions of almost two hours. We can
take the exams to have LPIC 1, 2, 3. It's also on the website, so there is link certifications. We
can check out. We had BSD associates and type of three certifications past years, but I'm still
waiting for an okay or not okay, so I can't confirm that yet, but it's likely to have that as well
as options. Okay. I see here also on the website that you have events for spouses and partners
things to do while. Right. The more political, politically correct term would be partners to
then. Yeah, we do. We notice that quite a few people do come around with their partner and
not every couple, not in every couple, we have that both are geekish enough. So we do arrange,
I believe, two tours, one is not one in Saturday, one on Sunday with a guide through Brussels,
so it takes pretty much the afternoon. And that sets very nice. There's a lot of
things to see in Brussels and the feedback of this. I haven't done it a bit too busy in a weekend,
but we've heard it's very well, well done. Yeah. And practical things like food and the like,
is there catering at the university? Yes. So there is a very large bar and near one of the
main rooms. There is a second bar. There's a little bit more often the campus. It's much quieter.
So you can have breakfast and you can have sandwiches, lots of sandwiches with different, well,
let's say typically Belgian sandwiches, large. And there's also we have obviously fries,
fries, and pizza and pasta, kind of stuff, hot food at noon. And throughout the day, you can have
all sorts of drinks, including Belgian beers, obviously. So seriously folks, it's a bad idea during
the day. No, it works really fine. Yes, if you have a Belgian or both. We never had any issues
with that, so I think it's fine. Okay, super. Does it stop for lunch or just go straight through?
No, everything goes straight through. So we do have like one hour of break on Saturday for the
main tracks, but on Sunday it goes through. And I mean, the dev rooms, every project manages their
desk area on their own. They typically have a break, but not everyone does. Well,
as I said, we provide the talks and it's up to visitors to make the best of it and good luck with that.
Okay. Make sense. It seems like you have done this before and you know what you're doing really.
Yeah, it's quite a lot. I mean, it's also what's important to say that the event is
to be free of charge. I mean, obviously, everyone already has enough expenses in terms of
accommodation and going there. Brussels is not cheap, but it's not the most expensive, so
compared to other capitals in Europe, it's certainly not the most expensive, but there are
several options depending on your budget. You can, we do accept donations, though. So you can get
the very, very trendy, very nice and absolute street credit, first empty shirt for our 25-year-olds
donation. They are really nice. And that actually makes an important part. I would say that it makes
something like 40 percent of our budget comes from the donations. So that actually keeps us,
gives us the ability of staying independent of taking up too many sponsors or less accommodating
sponsors. That's quite important. And you can donate more and you get rebate on a railing books
or a book for free depending on how much you donate. That's welcome. Yeah, I can imagine.
We also do have what I wanted to mention as well. I mean, we're a team of, I'd say pretty much
10 people organizing the event beforehand, but during the conference there are many, many people
helping out. And I mean, it's quite stunning because some, I remember there was a group of
four people coming from Italy last year and out of those four people, the very least one
was always helping out at our infodest and stuff like that. So many, many people from the community
at large do help us out as well. That would be possible, obviously, without their support.
Fantastic to hear. Quite a lot of people listen to this from the States or Australia or
different places around the world, Mexico or wherever. And obviously love to come, but probably can't.
So you recorded any of these events? Right. We probably won't do a live streaming.
We tried that last year, but we only had a couple of hundreds of people, hundreds of people
following it. So it's not quite worth the hassle. Not sure we're going to do it again, but what we do
is that we do record all the main track talks and the keynotes. We also record lightning talks.
And we have kind of a conference in the conference, which is the mini distribution mini conference.
Yeah, I'm going to talk about that actually, which where we record all the talks as well,
everything will be available through our website. We'll take a few weeks to get encoded and get
uploaded and put on mirrors, obviously. And we also put everything on YouTube.
So just follow the website. We will announce. We'll be a couple of weeks after the event. So
everything will be available. You can get it in an open format from our website or from YouTube.
What license are they on?
Creative Commons license. I don't remember. But you're not exactly.
You'd also gather the speaker presentation.
Yeah, we do our best. Yes, it's always. It's never that easy, but we do,
yeah, we do annoy them on a regular basis to get the slides and stuff.
Okay, what we're trying to do here on the HPR network for our visually impaired listeners is to
take the shells and augment them so that we describe the slides at the back. We're also looking
for volunteers here to do that. So it helps us a lot if we can get these presentations.
It makes it easier than having to pause a frame and then try and figure out what the text was.
I was flashing for two seconds. Yeah, so if you can tell your presenters that that's what we're
trying to do, that will help. That's a good point. Yeah, indeed. I want to mention briefly the
cross-distribution conference as well because that's a lot happening there. We actually started that
two years ago. The thing is that there were many, many Linux distribution projects that we're
having a developer room at Phasem. I'm quite obviously quite an important part of open source.
But there were so many, almost half the conference was taken by distributions and at some point
I decided that, well, let's use Phasem a bit better as a tool, as I mentioned earlier,
and let's just force them to be together. Yes, I had to force them the first year and some weren't
that happy and said, well, can we have our own development? No. But it actually works out very,
very well. The sessions are, I mean, the first year was more of a time sharing kind of thing.
I do one gen2 talk and then we one opens user talk. But now it's getting more and more
into topics and talks that are really about collaborative stuff and
comparing and discussing pros and cons of approaches. It actually even gives the ability to,
let's say, you know, quoting smaller projects to be able to have a few talks there as well.
So that really works out very, very well. It takes place in two of the largest rooms we have
also during the whole weekend. So that's an important part of the conference as well.
Works out really nice and I'm very, very happy about that. Okay, super fantastic.
One of your requirements for tables is to have at the minimum two, you know, at all times.
So I would just like to call here, I'm going and I know that other Hitchcock members will be going
that I would like somebody to come and volunteer. Ideally, at least one, if not the people could come
and volunteer to help us out with the table because while people are manning or
warming the desk, I would like a lot of people to go around and grab me interviews for the
thing here. So that's just volunteers again, I'd mean a public radio door please.
So Pascal, have we missed anything or?
I think we've actually mentioned most important things for sure. Yeah.
Well, I mean, just to make it real brief, it's a hell of a lot of fun being there.
It's very busy, but it's a lot of fun. You get to talk to many, many people who really do that.
And I would say that probably at least 90% of the people who go to force them are actively
involved and contributing to open-source projects. So not just hackers, you know, people doing
all kinds of stuff, contributing, which doesn't mean that if you're genuinely interested,
but not contributing, you shouldn't go there, but just to give you an idea that it's really where
everyone is to vary these as far as Europe is concerned. And it's a lot of fun.
Just one or two questions about accessibility for our listeners who might be
confined to wheelchairs. Are there rooms accessible?
Most are, not all of them. We do, I mean, the ideal would be to contact us beforehand
at infoatfastem.org and we can try to arrange that we can have someone
who can help you out in that case, especially to help you guide you and give you a list of rooms
that are accessible and which aren't. We're not very good on that. I have to say,
that's a kind of stuff we should mention on the website, but we don't.
But we do our best to help as far as we can during the conference.
Super. Do you have any age restrictions on any of the events?
I guess so. Do you have any age restrictions on any of the events
or family friendly or would you? There are no age restrictions at all.
Apart from the album Friday night. Yes, obviously. You have to be,
yeah, I think it's Belgium. In Belgium, it's 16, I think.
Super. Listen, thank you very much for taking the time to be with us. Of course,
if there's anything that you'd like to update on, if there's a farmer in an email or
if we can arrange another entry later on. Look forward to meeting you as the event
and I hope it goes very well for you. Yeah, thanks a lot for having me and yeah, see you there.
Okay, see you there. Yeah, bye-bye.
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