This year I was able to attend this year’s FOSSASIA in Singapore. It’s quite a decently sized event with more than 150 speakers and more than 1000 people attending. Given the number of speakers you can infer that there was an insane number of talks in the two and a half day of the conference. I’ve seen recordings being made so I would expect those to show up at some stage, but I don’t have any details. The atmosphere was very friendly and the venue a-maze-ing. By that I mean that it was a fantastic and huge maze. We were hosted in Singapore’s Science Museum which exhibits various things around biology, physics, chemistry, and much more. It is a rather large building in which it was easy to get lost. But it was great being among those sciency exhibits and to exchange ideas and thoughts. Sometimes, we could see an experiment being made as a show to the kids visiting the museum. These shows included a Tesla coil or a fire tornado. Quite impressive.
One of the first things I could see was Cat Altmann talking about her position being in the field of marketing which, she says, engineers tend to not like. But as opposed to making people like things they don’t need or want, she is rather concerned with reaching out to people to open source code. The Making and Science team within Google exists to work on things like sending kids from under resourced schools to field trips. Science also plays a role in this year’s Summer of Code. 43+ out of 180 projects are related to science, she said.
Nikolai talked about the Nefertiti hack. In case you missed it, the Nefertiti was “cloned”. The bust is a 3000 years old artefact which is housed in Berlin and is publicly available (for people who can travel to Berlin…). The high resolution data of the scanned object is, however, not available, along with many many other data that the museums have about their objects. He compared that behaviour to colonisation; I couldn’t really follow why, though. Anyway, they managed to scan the bust themselves by sneaking into the museum and now they’ve released the data. Their aim, as far as I could follow, was to empower people to decide about what culture is and what not. Currently, it is the administration which decides, he said. With the data (and I think with a printed copy of the bust) they travelled to Egypt to make an exhibition. But beforehand, they had produced a video which substantiates the claim of having found a second bust while digging for artefacts. The talk itself was interesting, but the presentation was bad. the speaker was lost a few times and didn’t know how to handle the technical side of the presentation. Anyway, I like it when such guerrilla art makes it into the news.
Lenny talked about systemd which uncovered some news that you may have missed if you’re not following its development too closely. He said that systemd has moved to github and while it’s attracting new contributors it still has major issues which he didn’t mention though. A component named networkd is now the default on both Fedora and Ubuntu. It’s a rather underwhelming piece of software though, because it has no runtime interface. The nspawn tool is used by CoreOS’ rkt docker alternative. He also mentioned sd-bus which he claims is a replacement for the reference DBus implementation. Another interesting thing he mentioned is that systemd can not only do socket activation but also USB Function FS activation. So whenever you are in the need to start your USB gadget only when the USB cable has been plugged in, systemd may be for you.
In another session, Lenny continued talking about systemd with regards to its container capabilities. Containers are all the rage, right..? He said that all the systemd tools work on containers, too, with the -M switch. systemd also just works inside a container, with the exception of Docker, he said. It is also possible to make systemd download and verify images to run full system images. Funnily enough, he said, Ubuntu images are properly signed but Fedora images are not.
I also had a talk and a workshop to give. The workshop was titled “Functionality, Security, Usability: Choose any two. Or GNOME.” which is a bit sensational, I admit. I’m not experienced with holding workshops and it was unclear to me what to expect. Workshop sounds to me like people come and they want to hack on something. The venue, however, was not necessarily equipped with a reliable Internet connection for the attendees. Also, the time was set to one hour. I don’t think you can do a meaningful workshop within one hour. so I didn’t really know how to prepare. I ended up ranting about OpenPGP, GnuPG, and SKS. Then I invited people to hack on GNOME Keysign which was a bit difficult. given the time constraints we had. Well, that I mainly had, because I was meant to give a proper talk shortly after.
During my talk, I gave a glimpse on what to expect from GNOME 3.20 codename Delhi. It was a day before the release, so it was the perfect timing for getting people excited. And I think it worked reasonably well. I would have loved to be able to show the release video, but it wasn’t finished until then. So I mainly showed screenshots of the changes and discussed on a high level what GNOME is and what it is not. People were quite engaged and still believe GNOME 3 was designed for tablets.
FOSSASIA used to be in Vietnam and it was actually co-hosted with GNOME.Asia Summit once. It smells like we could see such a double event in the future, but probably in Singapore. I think that’d be great, because FOSSASIA is a well organised event, albeit a little chaos here and there. But who doesn’t have that… In fact, I nearly couldn’t make it to the conference, because GNOME did not react for two weeks so the conference removed me from the schedule. Eventually, things worked out, so all is good and I would like to thank the GNOME Foundation for contributing to the coverage of the costs.
