I was at FOSDEM again this year, and as usual I took notes, which I’ll write up here. I’ll probably spread them out over a few posts, but maybe I’ll get excited and post them all at once.

FOSDEM is a peculiarly intense conference. It has three main tracks, but also developer rooms and thousands of people. It lasts just two days, so much activity also happens at restaurants and bars after the official activity. I usually tell people new to FOSDEM that they ought to train for it, say by drinking 5 beers a night and not sleeping for a few days. Many people, including me, commented this weekend that there’s nothing comparable to FOSDEM in the US. Hmm, I’ve always wanted to go to a conference or meeting here in Boulder 🙂

This year FOSDEM started even earlier for me — I met Andrew Haley in London and then, on the chunnel train on Friday, it turned out we were sitting across the aisle from Michael Meeks. We spent most of the ride discussing OO.o, his -Bdirect patch (read the link to see the huge OO.o startup performance boost this gets), gcj, and other free software and hacking topics.

Once we got to Brussels, though, he took a different cab and then somehow I didn’t see him again. That was too bad, since he’s very interesting and personable; and also I felt somewhat bad since I was very tired when I saw him and, though I can’t remember exactly what, I’m sure I said several stupid things during the conversation. Luckily Andrew was there to carry the flag :-). Hopefully I’ll meet him again sometime.

He did say I should consider OO.o as my next project (I asked basically everybody I ran into about my future plans). My impression is that he considers it a potential mozilla-like success story: get people on Windows using it, and they are one step closer to Linux. This does seem compelling, though I don’t think interesting for me personally to be hacking on…

Later that night the Classpath and OpenJDK folks all met up at a restaurant, and then later went to the BXL bar (our traditional spot — the official beer event was way too crowded). I finally got to meet various Sun folks, but more on that later. I went to bed early, citing jet lag, and apparently missed various people who only arrived at the bar after midnight.