5 Feb
2015
5 Feb
'15
11:06 p.m.
Hi all,
FOSDEM 2015 has ended some days ago. After five years of absence, the
ReactOS Project was finally represented with a stand again, maintained
by Aleksey Bragin, Giannis Adamopoulos, Pierre Schweitzer and me.
Turns out that FOSDEM has significantly grown over the recent years,
so our experiences really deserve a report - and should motivate
others to join us next time! :)
Our stand was born around 11 o'clock on Saturday when I arrived at the
AW building. After walking several rounds in the building and neither
finding known people nor a free table, it turned out that the coreboot
guys next to us had tried to expand their presence a bit ;)
Reclaiming our booth was a matter of a few words though, and soon we
had a sweet spot in the building with enough space for the upcoming
crowd. With Aleksey arriving shortly after that, along with several
flags and pins, our empire was finally alive and marked! Giannis and
Pierre arrived in the course of the day, right in time for the
afternoon rush hour with lots of people interested in ReactOS. Our
four person booth staff was really overwhelmed in these times. But
let's see, maybe we even got new developers through this :)
Our stock of 100 ReactOS demonstration CDs prepared by Hermès
Bélusca-Maito and me already ran out during the first day. Given our
experiences at other exhibitions and the general phase-out of CDs
these days, this came totally unexpected. But it wouldn't be the
ReactOS Project if we had no solution to the problem. On the same
Saturday evening, Pierre and me went out on a little adventure into
downtown Brussels in the hope of finding open stores that sell all we
needed: Blank CDs, labels and paper sleeves. And we were successful!
Returning with another 100 CDs, all disc drives of our laptops were
working that evening and the full other day, busy with burning new
ReactOS CDs. FOSDEM staff was kind enough to offer one of their
printers for getting the additional labels done. And our booth on
Sunday had partly turned into a CD manufacturing plant. With the
consequence of people sometimes grabbing the CD labels and trying to
read them before being presented with our real flyers :)
At the end of the conference, around 170 ReactOS CDs were in the wild.
Definitely much more than what we expected!
Of course, the culinary supply also didn't come too short in the
capital of Belgium. On Saturday evening, we met up with our friend
Nuno Brito, who had already reserved a nice restaurant for us.
Obviously, he had learned from last year! I well remember the evening,
when five hungry geeks walked for half an hour through the city,
trying to beat the unsolvable problem of finding the best restaurant
for all of us.
I've put up some of Aleksey's and my photos here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/colinfinck/sets/72157650656130121/
Maybe more to come in the next few days!
I hope you're now all eager to join us next time to this wonderful event!
Cheers,
Colin
P.S.: Feel free to use this for a news article about FOSDEM on our website