David Johnson's Blog

Well having finally recovered from the beer and traveling associated with FOSDEM (it was a 10 hour journey for me, since I went by train in order to save a few quid) I figure I should do a quick write-up.

I didn’t take any photographs this time, simply because 1. I was feeling a bit lazy and 2. it has been shown from previous visits that my camera is not good enough to get decent photographs.

Anyway, for me the best talks of FOSDEM 2007 were Simon Phipps‘ Liberating Java and Sean Moss-Pultz’s OpenMoko.

While I’m not really interested in Java itself (I really don’t like Java as a language; it’s too object-oriented, if that makes sense), I am interested in Sun’s reason for GPLing Java and in their new-found commitment to Free Software. Simon Phipps is a really good speaker; he is somewhat like Stallman in that he has the ability to clearly convey what he’s trying to say and when he says something, you believe him. I think it’s essential that Sun have someone like Simon to speak for them, since as a community we’re somewhat wary of corporations that claim to be on our side, since that’s exactly how Novell were before they turned around and screwed us.
In any case, the talk actually wasn’t really about Java, but more about how Sun has come to recognise the importance of Free Software and are making a serious commitment to it – such as, announced for the first time during the talk, Sun becoming a corporate patron of the Free Software Foundation. What was also emphaised was that ‘Sun are listening’ are want to know if they’re screwing up in the eyes of the FLOSS community – this is good to hear and I hope that continues. I was hoping to catch up with Simon to discuss OpenSolaris licensing and how it is impacting on my Linux kernel development work, but unfortunately didn’t get the opportunity. I’ll have to mail him instead.

The OpenMoko talk was really interesting, because these guys have some really big ambitions and are bringing some new ideas to a somewhat stagnant industry. The company behind the OpenMoko project are producing a mobile phone (the Neo1973) based on 99% FLOSS, which is completely hackable: you can write standard GTK applications for them – none of this cut-down-slow-as-hell-Java nonsense to worry about. The small room the talk was in was not just full, but over-full – people were spilling out into the corridor. Clearly the popularity of the OpenMoko project had been grossly underestimated – it should have been in one of the main lecture theaters. A development model will be available in about a month for just $350 – I will absolutely be having one, presuming I can get a nice discount when they launch the final hardware revision a few months later. One thing that really annoys me is when I buy a mobile phone, only to find that the firmware is full of bugs (my current handset has more than its fair share). The prospect of having a bugzilla in which to report firmware bugs and having the ability to fix such things myself is really cool.
Looking at the handset in-the-flesh, it was cool to see it booting a regular Linux kernel with all the usual boot-up messages and framebuffer penguin in the top-left of the screen, but it did take about a minute or so from power-on until the UI was loaded – I hope this is fixed before they go into production!

I have to say that having been to FOSDEM each year since 2005, this has been the best one. Previously I’ve had difficulty finding enough talks that I’m interested in seeing, especially on the Sunday, but this time I was in talks all day on Saturday and most of the day on Sunday. Good work FOSDEM organisers!