bsod’s braindumps

Fosdem 2006

March 5, 2006 on 2:18 pm | In .english | No Comments

Saturday: Yesterday I went to Belgium, to the city of Hasselt, to meet an old friend of mine, Jan, to go to the FOSDEM 2006 Open Source conference. I’ve been in trains for about 4 hours, which is bearable. You can see the landscape change as you go South, and it’s nice to see it passing by and change into the more hilly environment of Belgium. Jan, his wife Saskia, and me, had dinner somewhere in Hasselt. After that we went to a nice brown pub, ‘de Egel’, and had some pints of Guinness. Guinnes is good for you

Fosdem today itself (in Brussels) is not as grand as I hoped it would be, but it was a trip worth taking. Most of my day was spent at the X.org room. The most interesting talk was undoubtly given by Keith Packard, who talked about the Coordinate Transformation Manager, used in Composited X-Windows.

As Jan quickly demo’ed for me, X is actually on the move to better things. More precisely, it’s the Xgl X server that is causing al the hype. Basically Xgl is an X server implemented in OpenGL. Wow. Actually good stuff being done with OpenGL. Ofcourse I had to be there all day. I suppose that the most easy to demonstrate features of Xgl are the 3D cube that has desktops on all sides, and the wobbly windows. This was demonstrated by Matthias Hopf, after a good solid introduction about what Xgl is all about.

Jan knew a couple of people to have dinner with, from the Jabber community, and so we went to have dinner with this group of geeks. The food was excellent, but the Americans where to loud and they basically don’t know how and why to shut up. They’re a bit like german tourists in Holland, but they differ in the fact that they speak English.

Jan and I left quite early, we’ve had an intensive day, and another intensive day is waiting tomorrow. I’ve decided to go back by train tomorow, which probably would mean I will leave somewhere at 4pm for the central station of Brussels. It’s not that bad, the X.org room is not completely filled with talks sunday afternoon.

I’ve not been able to hook my computer up to the LAN on FOSDEM, the network basically sucks raw eggs. Anyway, I’m not using Windows XP on an Open Source conference, that a bit below the belt imho So my laptop is gonna stay in the backpack tomorrow and all I’ll do is listen and talk.

Tomorrow is another busy day, I’m going to sleep.

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Sunday: Okay, I’m my way back to Holland. Here in the train I’m actually using my laptop for the first time today. The day was basically filled with talks, presentations and moving myself around in cars, busses, and now, trains. We arrived at FOSDEM relatively late, but I was able to follow the last part of the talk by Luc Verhaegen. I’m getting the impression that the X.org community is not really, really big. I walked up with Luc, who was getting lunch for the guys. The ‘club sandwich’ they have at the FOSDEM bar is kinda low-end, so we walked to some shop not far from the Fosdem site. During the walk I informed about X.org, it’s community and what he would like to see me do/contribute. Luc is a low-level guy, busy with the Modesetting part of X. You know, those horrid lines of numbers in your xorg.conf file. Anyway, he said that all I had to do is find a graphics board that has no maintainer and froogle/ebay for such a board and start to maintain it.

Okay, I can do that. It’s even kind of fun. It’s graphics after all. Luc made a horrible face when I explained him that my area was more OpenGL. Hehe, a real 2D-to-the-metal hacker he is… Use the force, Luc Don’t underestimate the importance of this kind of coding… everything in the (card-monitor) subsystem depends on this basic code.

However, I fell into a discussion between Luc, Stuart and Keith about the support of older hardware. I mean really, really, really old here. Say older than 10 years. Stuart rightfully said that having an old graphics board is basically a problem solved by spending $20 for a more recent (but still very old) board. Why would we spend so much time and effort in supporting this old hardware that even the nerdy developers can’t get their hands on.

When walking to the sandwich shop, Luc said that he could do whatever the hell he wants, and ofcourse that’s true. I’ts Open Source. To be frank, this is an ancient discussion: Not supporting ancient hardware is a loss of generality for the X system. However modern hardware all use new paradigms, that are generally better and/or faster than the ancient stuff. A nice dilemma.

Another issue is the quality of the community. Everybody knows the example of OpenBSD, with Theo de Raadt. Theo is arrogant and unable to be friendly/patient with people who know less than him. They kicked him out of NetBSD because of his inability to work with people.

Now that OpenBSD is a community of it’s own you actually see people flock to the OpenBSD stands, drooling over the cool guys that hand out T-shirts and CD’s. As if it’s cool to be arrogant, or the other way around ‘If you are arrogant, you are probably cool/important’.

That’s one community issue. Another one is the presense of company people in this Open Source event. I’m not sure, but both Stuart and Keith are people from Intel. Another guy from Novell made a speach. Their presentation slides dominantly display Intel and Novell logo’s. X.org is receiving funds from big companies like IBM HP Novell Intel and so forth. Luc’s slides had no such logo: He’s just a guy who hacks. During the sandwich walk, I asked him straight: ‘Can X.org survive without corporate donations?’ He hesitated, but said ‘Yes’. The only good answer in my humble opinion, otherwise we’ve finaly drilled down to wat ‘Open Source’ means for corporate people.