Last weekend, many of FSFE’s teams descended upon Brussels, Belgium for the 2007 FOSDEM meeting to spend two days between computers, talks and Belgium beer.
There must have been around 20 people from FSFE alone, and we came well-prepared: FSFLA board member and FSFE Fellow Fernanda Weiden had the idea to put the Fellowship mascot on her nails, adding another entry to the "Fellowship everywhere" section:
There were quite a bit of interesting talks during FOSDEM this year, and FSFE’s were among them. Shane Coughlan gave a lightning talk about the Freedom Task Force and I was given the chance to hold the closing keynote, which is also available as video download (327m). Let’s see whether my closing prediction will come out more true than some of the others I referenced:
"Sandwiched between Vista problems, antitrust issues and the global push for Open Standards, Microsoft will increasingly lose the initiative. Free Software will start to cut into the desktop monopoly from which Microsoft has previously excerted force to conquer neighboring markets. Eventually Microsoft will be forced to fundamentally rethink its business model in favor of Free Software."
— Georg Greve, keynote@FOSDEM 2007
Other talks can be found on FOSDEM’s media page. There are also several FOSDEM 2007 pictures that have been uploaded by various people to Flickr.
And finally I’d like to say a word to all the people from FSFE and the FOSDEM team: Thank you very much, you made this an extraordinary event!
