View source for FrOSCon 2006 Report

''(This was originally posted on the [http://lists.geeklog.net/mailman/listinfo/geeklog-devel geeklog-devel] mailing list. I'm reproducing it here since we lost a good portion of our mailing list archives in various moves ...)''

:From: Dirk Haun
:To: geeklog-devel
:Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2006 22:31:06 +0200

So, I was at FrOSCon, the Free and Open Source Conference, yesterday
(Saturday). While it was a two-day event, I was only there on the first day.

Getting up at 5am isn't exactly my idea of having fun but that's what
you have to do to spread the word, I guess. Consequentially, I slept
through most of the train rides to and from Sankt Augustin (which is
just north of Bonn, Germany's former capital).

Probably also a result of the lack of sleep (so as not to call it
stupidity on my part), I forgot to hand out the Geeklog flyers I had
brought with me. Oh well, there will be other conferences ...

My opening question if anyone knew Geeklog was met with blank stares,
again. So, again, it was good to be there just to make sure people have
at least heard of it.

The conference was very well organized, especially if you consider that
it was held for the first time. The rooms at the Fachhochschule
("university of applied sciences", according to my dictionary) Bonn-
Rhein-Sieg were great, too, and mostly airconditioned, thankfully. If
they run the conference again next year, I'll make sure to visit it
again (and for both days, if possible).

I went to two talks at the PHP track[1], about web services and
XMLReader/Writer, two talks about MySQL (MySQL cluster and one about
their business model), and two from the "philosophy and legal issues"
track (about open standards and reusage of free software). All the talks
were scheduled to be 45 minutes + 10 minutes for discussion, which was a
good length, IMO. Long enough to cover most subjects and short enough to
keep the audience interested.

I've seen a few faces I've also seen at LinuxTag, but it was a much
smaller event (about 300 participants, as I've just read in someone' blog).

I had a chat with Pierre Joye, one of the PHP developers, about the lack
of an official PHP 4.4.3 release (which is supposed to fix security
issues that were fixed in PHP 5 weeks ago). The result was a post[2] on
the PHP internals mailing list - we'll see what sort of response I get
on that.

Technorati lists a few blog posts: <http://technorati.com/search/froscon><br>
Not much on flickr yet: <http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=froscon&w=all>

bye, Dirk

[1] <http://froscon.phpugdo.de/><br>
[2] <http://news.php.net/php.internals/24209>