My current record of FOSDEM attendance sees me there once per decade: my first visit was in 2007 and I’m having breakfast in my hotel at the end of my second trip. I should probably get here more often.
Unlike a lot of the corporate conferences I’ve been to in other fields, FOSDEM is completely free and completely organised by its community. An interesting effect of this is that whole there’s no explicit corporate presence, you’ll see companies represented if they actually support free and open source software as much as they claim. Red Hat doesn’t have a stand, but pick up business cards from the folks at CentOS, Fedora, GNOME, ManageIQ…
When it comes to free software, I’m a jack of many trades and a master of none. I have drive-by commits in a few different projects including FreeBSD and clang, and recently launched the GNUstep developer guide to add some necessary documentation, but am an expert nowhere.
That makes FOSDEM an exciting selection box of new things to learn, many of which I know nothing or little about. That’s a great situation to be in; it’s also unsurprising that I know so little as I’ve only been working with free software (indeed, any software) for a little over a decade.
