About ACTA

I am not sure how it happened, but while I was away, somehow the Romanian society got interested in ACTA and the topic became hot and trendy, trendy enough to rally all hipsters in a try to "save the Internet". Which is not a bad thing, the Internet is in big need for more freedom and protection. You see the topic on the news, magazines and TV, people talk about it... so yesterday evening a magazine organized a debate at a fancy cafés "ACTA and the Internet. The end or the beginning of an era?"

It was a high-level debate, having as guests a jurist, Bogdan Manolea, a philosopher, Constantin Vică and a jazzman, Mihai Iordache. The moderator, the magazine's editor-in-chief, Mircea Vasilescu, unable to find an ACTA supporter for a balanced debate, had to play the "devil advocate" and try to heat the discussion, otherwise everybody, speakers and audience, would have slammed ACTA. Tot that slamming ACTA is undeserved :) There were a bit over 50 people in the audience, some press, video recording, so I expect it to get echoed. The topic moved from ACTA to copyright in general and freedom on the Interned, with some nuances: the musician having some interests in copyright revenues, the lawyer having sympathy for (not-software) patents in some cases and the philosopher being the most radical, and probably closer to my own point of view. It was mostly about artists, but at the end it touched a bit the pharmaceutics industry, which everyone agreed is a bigger evil, deserving a separate talk.

FOSDEM 2012 photo dump

After a couple weeks on the road I had my hands full, but I am recovering and cleaning the queue, so now is the time to to what I usually do after every FOSS event I attend: dump a lot of photos, unedited, in a simple web gallery, so anyone can use them freely (CC-BY-SA). The photos from FOSDEM 2012 are up.
This thime the Fedora group booth was weak and the group... heterogeneous, barely acting as a group, so for the big finale we didn't even get a group picture, the best finale I can offer is this sunset from the last conference day (as you expect, many of the geeks there didn't noticed it).

On why GNOME got to suck so badly

Below are a few snaps from a FOSDEM presentation by GNOME's Allan and Seif about "how to trick a developer to being a designer":

So no wonder GNOME got to suck so badly and more and more people fondly remember the "good old days" when software used to be made by engineers and get your job done.

Contributor communities @FOSDEM

Right now I am sitting in the room 1301 of the H building of the ULB at FOSDEM 2012 and watching the Working with contributor communities round table, which is moderated by Cristoph, which tries to be as impartial as possible:

On behalf of Fedora (other represented distros are, from left to right, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Debian, Mageia and Gentoo I believe) we have Joerg speaking:

LGM @FOSDEM 2012

Yesterday evening, after the first day of FOSDEM, there was the dinner of the Libre Graphics people, talking about the upcoming conference in May in Vienna but not only, mostly having fun and catching-up:

FOSDEM fanservice

I got a couple of personal requests, so I cannot disappoint my fans, fulfilling their inquiries now. One was for a picture of the official FOSDEM T-shirt design for this year (this is a tradition for the conference, to come every year with a completely new design):

The other one was for a photo of the Debian booth, which happens to be this year one of the busiest, being fillet with a lot of merchandise, mostly nice T-shirts. Too bad I don't see the Debian wine any more...

And being a nasty person, I will complete the circle with a picture of the wasteland at our own Fedora booth:

FOSDEM 2012

After many adventures in snow and very cold weather (an about 5 hours delayed flight) I managed to finally reach a frozen Brussels yesterday late in the evening:

Due to the unexpected delay, I missed the FAD and the traditional Drug Opera dinner, but at least got to the even more traditional (and important?) beer event at Delirium Cafe, making the first contact with the Fedora gang and many others: Today morning everybody goes to ULB for the FOSDEM conference: The Fedora team is, of course, here, preparing the booth. You can find us in the new K building, along with many other projects, like FSF, Mozilla, CentOS, Debian, openSUSE, Mageia, to mention a few: And the conference started, time for me to stop blogging and go meeting people, roam around, do things: