Fosdem 2012
Every year I find enough reasons to take out a chunk of my valuable time and get my butt over to Brussels to attend some talks at FOSDEM. This time it was the talk about how to implement domain-specific languages with LLVM that got me interested the most. LLVM is one of the most interesting open source projects to me and this talk did not disappoint: technical enough but not over my head, and with a relevant example that served as a tutorial. One could do very interesting stuff with this.
As always with FOSDEM however, the more interesting bits are where you discover things. On Twitter I saw a lot of mention of unhosted, and checked it out online. I was too late to attend the talk but I wish I had. In any case, the idea of liberating the data that is on the servers of all the social networks we use is something that inspired me already and it is great to find out about other projects that are in line with those ideas.
I still love the politics this conference stands for. The last talk, about Freedom Box, was the kind of project that you hope will be immensely successful. The talk itself was an update on the status of the Freedom Box since the ideas of it were introduced. As for what I understand from it now, it will be some Debian flavor that you can install on -for example- a Dreamplug and will allow for liberty enhancing internet browsing. The talk stayed a bit vague on the technical aspects of the software though. Also, I am afraid this is a bit too geeky to reach a larger audience, and a project like this needs to break out of the incrowd to be really successful.
