In the latest edition of the DataNews magazine (free ict magazine targeted at manager types), there is an article about Fosdem. The article is in Ducth but you can probably translate it decently enough to english (if needed) to get a better understanding about what i'm talking about.
There is a section where they question if the GPL is still a valid license, or is it out-dated? They argue that the GPL is not loved by companies and thus loses its competitive edge. Who cares? certainly not the OSS developer, he is not writing his piece of code for the benefit of companies, he doing it for himself, other developers and the users, screw the companies. GPL protects the user.
Last they move on to the subject that GPL3 has issues because it doesn't allow DRM, and that scares even more companies away. If that isn't a good thing for the user, i don't know what is. In fact, this last reason alone proves that the GPL servers and protects the users, you have to love it for that.

How about some Fosdem 2009 pictures, again i'll be focusing on the athmosphere, as for the talks, there are other resources to get more info on them. If you haven't been to Fosdem yet, I hope these picture will wet your appetite.

What? I don't want to do that, delete my willy are you nuts!?

It's always that crowded, from the early morning till late in the afternoon.

Hey, an Ubuntu stand, they weren't here the previous years. As you can see from the shot, Netbooks everywhere!

Power to the people!

This is becomming a problem. This is a picture taken during a lecture in one of the main tracks. There is room for more then 800 people, if there are 80 people in whole it's a lot. In contrast, the dev.rooms are packed and sometimes don't have enough seats. Fosdem needs to figure out how to avoid things like this. Tracks should get a populairity vote to know in which room to schedule them.

Brussels is so much fun, so much to see. Even a simple tree holds a surprise.

Ubuntu init replacement upstart lecture first slide.

Look! i can take shit pictures with my phone camera

Two heroes, Micheal Meeks and Keith Packard discussing the meaning of life.

My Fosdem loot: Fedora CD, OpenSUSE CD, NetBSD CD, MirOS CD, PCBSD CD, FreeBSD CD, Fosdem 09 girly T-Shirt (for my wife), Flyers for/from Ubuntu, Fosdem, Perlmonks Workshop (Leuven, Belgium), BSD; 2 badges from the Firefox/Mozilla stand, 1 foot-sticker from the Gnome stand, an O'Reilly plastic bag and the O'Reilly CSS pocket guide. Geek life is good.

Show people KDE4 and tell them it is Windows 7, lets see how they react.



Surprised? Can you imagine how upset MS would be if a distro would be named 'Lindows' which could confuse people in actually buying a Linux version instead of Windows and then liking it more.

I've had it up to here with all this Windows 7 propaganda on the net the last month or since whenever MicroSoft released their public beta. Vista was the first time the press was bad to Windows from the beginning for the first time. All previous releases were crap as well, but the press and tech sites never really send out this negaive vibe en-mass as they did with Vista. Now this is no more, Windows 7 sound like the best thing since slices bread, at least accoring to them. Will Windows 7 really be this great? It will hopefully be better then Vista, but it will still be a piece of crap, just like all windows versions that preceded it. Yes, you say, but this time the press is really excited. Indeed, but mostly they are always excited when MS comes up with another OS release and it never turns out to be all that is claimed. Secondly, it could well be better then Vista, at least that is something to sheer about.

Listen, if you pull of a release like Vista when you are not MS, you would lose marketshare so fast. Imagine Canonial releasing a really bad Ubuntu, Vista style. Users would migrate to a better, other linux distro and it would take a long time to rebuild the community they had.

If you've been using computers for more then 10 years, and you're a Windows user and you're buying all the Windows 7 propaganda on the net right now? to you i say: fool you once, shame on them - fool you twice, shame on you!

Imagine that, both Red Hat and Sun Microsystems are about equal in market capitalization ($2.6 billion). This does not mean that RH turns the same profit as Sun does, at this point Sun still has higher profit by a very large margin. The market capitalization shows us what the market thinks the company is worth (or the total value of all the shares of the company). I don't know about you, but i think this is remarkable, a major turning point for RH.

Sometimes vendors do their best to hide stuff from customers. For example, i noticed a lot of laptops using the Intel Core 2 Duo T5870 processor, however searching for the exact specs of this beast you will find exactly nothing on intels site (and it is even the developer site, none the less). Nothing in the available list of cpu and even zero results from the site-search.

Then i stumbled upon intel ARK site, which did contain the information. After entering the cpu model, i got all the specs i was looking for, fast. great site to add to you bookmarks to lookup stuff when you stumble upon one of the OEM offerings with hidden specs.

2009 is already almost 2 weeks old and i still haven't looked back at 2008, I'm probably the last person on the net to do so, which is a feat in itself.

Linux & OSS headlines for 2008 for me include:

• Python 3.0 gets released. the good just keeps getting better.
• The first Android phone ships, it uses the Linux kernel. Not long after that the iPhone gets hacked and is able to boot Linux too. Seems like Linux own the portable-communication-device world.
• The whole Ubuntu/Firefox-EULA discussion

The best games of last year are:

• Wii: Super Mario Galaxy, although it was already available in '07, i only got around playing it in 2008. And everybody loved it, a lot. It is a great game to play with the family. Other great games include 'Lost Winds', 'Zack & Wiki' and 'de Blob'. Although, none have the attraction (to the rest of the family) as Mario has.
• DS: Final Fantasy IV, it is wonderful, goes of to a slow start and it doesn't seem to be as good as FF3, but it picks up pace very fast and doesn't let go.

TV brought some nice things in 08:

• Dexter is the best series,
• but Top Gear is now available on national TV and rates as the best show for me. No Heroes this year, the series was cut short by the Hollywood writers strike.

The price for best Linux distro in 2008 goes to:

• Ubuntu, but just. There are so many new (and older) good distros rising (some even based on Ubuntu) maybe next year the desktop king will be dethroned.