FOSDEM

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about "free software" as defined by the sociopolitical free software movement; for information on software distributed without charge, see freeware. For other uses, see free software (disambiguation).

Since 2001, the Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (commonly known as FOSDEM) is an annual 2-day event hosting talks, tutorials, and stalls for the free software/open source community. It is organised by volunteers at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium every year at the end of February.

Access to all parts of FOSDEM is free, but donations and sponsors are requested to help fund the event. In 2004 it was attended by 2500 people.

In addition to the main schedule, rooms are provided for individual projects to hold discussions.

It has been the venue for the Free Software Foundation's Award for the Advancement of Free Software since 2001 although 2006 was an exception. Richard Stallman has given one of the keynotes nearly every year.

The event in 2001 was Open Source Developers European Meeting. Its current name was adopted in 2002.

[edit] 2005

Tim O'Reilly opened the event with a talk about online privacy. Richard Stallman gave the follow-up keynote talking about Copyright vs. Community in the age of Computer Networks. Alan Cox and Jimmy Wales also gave well attended talks.

[edit] 2006

Richard Stallman did the opening with a speech about software patents, followed by some comments about the aim of the GPLv3.

Uriel M. Pereira gave a speech about Plan 9 from Bell Labs.

Jeff Waugh closed the event with a speech about Free Software and the GNU/Linux Desktop.

[edit] External links

• FOSDEM official site
• Collection of videos from FOSDEM 2005 and 2006
• official fosdem wiki:reports about fosdem 2006
• official fosdem wiki:pictures about fosdem 2006
• A transcript of Richard Stallman's talk on GPLv3 from FOSDEM 2006
• wiki page about fosdem 2006