Along with all the videos of all FOSDEM editions, the FOSDEM team put the 2009 videos on YouTube. So here is the video about Gemvid: [youtube &hl=en&fs=1] The presentation in PDF is still available from the Gemvid webpage (and in live here).
This year, I only went for the Saturday afternoon session of FOSDEM 2009, the Free and Open Source software developers’ European Meeting. Two years ago, I mentioned the general trend that more women were interested in free/open source software/movement and this trend continues. But this time, I also noticed some really cute babies … and my son Neel-Alexandre was one of them of course! Although he’s only 7-month-old, he was really interested in the FreeBSD, Linux and Firefox mascots (respectively a red daemon, Tux the penguin and a fox). You are never too young to taste the truth ;-) ...
Fosdem is “a two-day event organized by volunteers to promote the widespread use of Free and Open Source software”. I will be presenting Gemvid during a lightning talk on Saturday :-)
This Sunday, I attended only two talks. These talks were in the embedded track since I was with my brother who is interested in this. The first talk, “SH-2A Linux kernel” by Yoshinori Sato, was very difficult to follow since Yoshinori did not tell us what is the SH-2A microprocessor (it is apparently used in cars, a.o.) and his English was very bad. In the second talk, Vitaly Wool introduced XIP, a way to directly run portions of software from where it’s stored in a type of Flash memory (instead of being copied to RAM first). With XIP, you can reduce boot time (or at least the “time to splashscreen”, especially interesting in handheld devices where you want to quickly be “productive”). But you can have other occasions where speed of execution is more important than price (because the type of Flash memory used is more expensive than standard RAM). Yesterday, Jim Gettys said the OLPC laptop can boot very quickly but it was thanks to the use of LinuxBIOS (and maybe XIP?). I also liked when he took a pen to show us something on a slide and said that it’s “because my wife is here and she said it’s bad manners when I point at things with my finger”. ;-) ...
I spent this Saturday at FOSDEM, listening to some interesting talks. Pieter Hintjens spoke about the Status of Software Patents in Europe. As the FFII president, he should clearly be against software patents. But, although his speech went in this direction, the 3 new FFII initiatives are diluting his/its position as well as the threat (the 3 initiatives are European patent conferences, the creation of the European Software Market Association to lobby the EU and a Campaign for Ethical Patents). Let’s talk seriously: software patents are not a solution and shouldn’t be allowed ; no trade-off. ...