FOSDEM'13 : Personal Impressions

This year’s FOSDEM is now over, and I finally made it back home. FOSDEM was buzzing, there was great content, lots of beer, meeting old friends and makign new friends. The number of attendees was impressive: according to the organizers – all volunteers – more than 5,000 open source enthusiast attended. Probably the number was even higher as FOSDEM requires no registration.
This year, I co-organized the virtualisation devroom with David Neary and Renzo Davioli. Thank you to both of them, the speakers, the audience and the FOSDEM organizers who helped made the devroom a success – at least in my view. As I am thanking people, I also wanted to thank our volunteers from the Xen developer community and user community who submitted talks and spent time on our booth. A special thank you goes to KB from CentOS, who saved our day by helping us out with CentOS-Xen co-branded T-Shirts. Our own T-Shirts didn’t arrive.
Rather than going on and talk about numbers, presentations and meetings I will keep today’s post short. I did want to pick out four of my personal highlights though:

• It was great to see members of the Xen Orchestra project hanging out at the Xen booth and showing Xen and XCP users what they are doing. Any Xen related project is welcome to do something similar in future: just drop me a line.
• It was fantastic to see that Xen support is coming to CentOS 6!
• One of our Xen users (and a Qubes contributor) gave us an extremely impressive demo of Qubes OS 1.0 at our booth. Get the irony? It is great to see what cool stuff other projects do with Xen. When I find some time, I will install and learn how to use Qubes.
• We worked on the details of a Xen Hackathan that we are co-organzing with the Ganeti team at Google. The Hackathon will take place in Dublin on May 16 & 17. Save the date!

Xen related talks will be available in the usual places on slideshare and vimeo. As always, FOSDEM is a great event to make connections and build bridges with other open source projects.