Erwin Lansing from the FreeBSD Foundation will be available at the FreeBSD booth during FOSDEM, to be held in Brussels, Belgium, February 5-6. If you’re at this event, drop by to say hi, discuss the Foundation’s work, pick up a Foundation flyer, check out the swag, or make a donation. FOSDEM is free to attend.

There will be a BSD devroom during FOSDEM with network/internet connectivity and projectors. DevRooms are a place for teams to discuss, hack and publicly present latest directions, lightning talks, news and discussions.

Philip Paeps, a FOSDEM organizer and FreeBSD committer, will be proctoring the BSDA examination. More information about the examination is available here.

The post FreeBSD Foundation at FOSDEM first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.

The Foundation was a sponsor of this year’s KyivBSD, held in Kiev, Ukraine on September 25. Alexander Yerenkow, the conference organizer, provided this report on the conference:

KyivBSD was the second installment in a newly created series of BSD-related conferences held in the Ukraine. The conference was attended by people from the Ukraine as well as Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. The Foundation’s financial support helped to make both this and last year’s conference possible.

This year we were able to attract new partners and sponsors. Last year it was difficult to attract local companies as many were unfamiliar with BSD. This year, having last year’s success as an example, was a lot easier. The local branch of D-Link was interested in sponsoring the conference and gave away three brand new WiFi routers. We received proposals from a few companies to place advertisements at the conference for money, but at the moment, we have no need for additional funds. We saw first-hand that many companies, individuals, and users have become more aware of FreeBSD and believe that the conference played a role in raising this awareness.

During the conference we ran a lottery with donated placards, books and routers for prizes. The funds raised from the lottery will be donated back to the Foundation at the end of this year.

The day after the conference we proctored the BSDA certification, which was the nearest certification event this fall for exam candidates from Russia and Kazakhstan. We were happy to provide them with the opportunity to take the exam.

Looking forward to next year, we hope to attract even more companies and attendees.

The post Report from KyivBSD first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.

The FreeBSD Foundation will be represented at the *BSD booth during Ohio Linuxfest this upcoming Saturday in Columbus, Ohio. This conference is free, but you need to register by midnight this Wednesday.

The *BSD booth will be available from 8:30 to 19:30 and we’ll have Foundation pamphlets and swag available and can accept cash donations. As always, donations will be recorded on the Foundation website.

The post FreeBSD Foundation at Ohio LinuxFest first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.

In Why We Send Developers to Conferences, Thomas Abthorpe discussed the value in face-to-face networking with both committers and BSD users.
In this post, Ion-Mihai Tetcu discusses the importance of BSD developers speaking at non-BSD specific and international conferences. His report also shows some of the lessons that can be learned from meeting with users and learning first-hand how a global project is meeting their local needs.

I had the opportunity, with the Foundation’s help, to participate as a speaker at FISL 10 in Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil. This year’s anniversary edition had 8,232 paying attendees, speakers from 28 countries, a lot of vendors and user groups, and a powerful media presence. FISL was sponsored, among others, by the Brazilian Federal Government and Brazil’s President Mr. Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva gave a nice speech .

Open source in Brazil has a powerful momentum, being promoted by the federal and various states and local governments. It is seen as a way to reduce the country’s dependency on foreign companies, a way to reduce unemployment, and generate local revenues and expertise. It is used by the national bank, federal government institutions and even by local subsidiaries of big multinational companies. Open Source in Brazil pretty much equals Linux, especially RedHat, Suse and Debian (who all have powerful user-groups) and a few local distributions. (Free)BSD is also used, especially by telcos and in the embedded market. More that 50% of the attendees didn’t understand English and the situation is even worse in the general public. This practically implies that, without localization, a software product can not have any significant market share in Brazil.

Apart from my DSPAM talk, I gave a general talk about FreeBSD ports and packages and PCBSD’s PBIs, was one of the hosts of the BSD-Meeting and assisted at the FUG-BR stand. Unfortunately, the other BSDs had zero presence. The 6 hours of the BSD-Meeting were a micro-conference attended by 65-70 people. Of the 5 talks, 3 could have easily found a place on the main schedule and I repeatedly kicked those speakers for not submitting their talks to FISL organizers. From the Brazilian user’s perspective, the biggest problem faced is the lack of a localized version of FreeBSD. For example, I was asked if we could provide a framework for localizing the OPTIONs and pkg-message of our ports. When faced with a new operating system, many users will choose a localized Linux variant over the effort of learning both a new operating system and a new language. As a first step, I am pursuing with the PC-BSD folks the idea of doing a custom-built PC-BSD variant localized for Brazil. Marcelo Araujo presented what the translation process implies and one of the results of the BSD-Meeting is a restart ofthe Brazilian Documentation Project.

Lacking any promotional materials except a few posters, the FUB-BR booth didn’t attract as many people as the other booths. However, it was a place where people could meet some FreeBSD committers and we had many interesting discussions with both FreeBSD and Linux users. One of the things practically everybody I spoke with during the conference told me was that they desire international speakers. At least 30 people attended FISL because there was a FreeBSD speaker from abroad. I think this is an important idea and that we should also encourage developers to give talks at general F/OSS conferences.

The post The Importance of Speaking at Conferences first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.

You probably know that the FreeBSD Foundation provides travel assistance for developers to attend conferences. If you’ve ever attended a BSD conference yourself, you have experienced first hand the value in networking with both committers and BSD users.

We’ll be asking developers we’ve sponsored to share their experiences and will start with Thomas Abthorpe, a FreeBSD ports committer who attended this year’s BSDCan. In Thomas’ words:

It is an over used and abused saying, and I will invoke it, “Been there, done that, got the t-shirt”. On the back of the shirt I received at registration it said “FreeBSD it’s all about the people, from all around the world”. For me, attending BSDCan was an opportunity to meet the people behind FreeBSD face to face. Email and IRC are great ways to collaborate with other developers, ideas can be shared, and projects brought to fruition, but in the end, the opportunity to get together with like minded people and just brainstorm in person is still the best way to get the job done.

I live in Thunder Bay, Ontario, a small city in central Canada, just north of the Minnesota border. My day job is as a Systems & Networks technician for the Canadian Grain Commission. FreeBSD is what I do for “fun” on my own time. Where I live, there are no local/user groups for any form of open source software. I have to rely on Internet technologies to reach out to others interested in FreeBSD. My interests in FreeBSD ports are quite varied; I maintain approximately 40 ports of various descriptions. Before I became a ports committer, I participated regularly in ports related bug busting weekends. Since becoming a committer,I worked with the FreeBSD KDE team that was instrumental in introducing KDE 4.x to the ports tree. I have also worked actively with the donations@ team, and have mentored other ports committers up through the ranks…

You can read the rest of Thomas’ writeup in this PDF.

The post Why We Send Developers to Conferences first appeared on FreeBSD Foundation.