El Mundo Libre

I visited T-DOSE last weekend. This is a short overview of some of my impressions.

• Less people?: I'm certainly not a fan of crowds, but a bit more visitors couldn't hurt. Visitor count went up in the previous years, yet it seems to have diminished (or at least stagnated) this year.
• Where were the women? I saw just 4 women during the whole conference, only one of which stayed for longer than half a day. I'm not sure why that number was so low, but today's conferences should be able to do better.
• Much more focus on technical than on open source. In almost every presentation I saw non-free software was used or suggested. Why can't PDF documents just be opened in Evince? Why does OpenLaszlo generate Flash objects that can only be used with the non-free plugin? What's your credibility if you're talking about "open source" in government policy while running your presentation on Windows?
• Apparently some software from the Dutch government is not published as Free software because they fear that the code is in such a state that they would loose face if everyone could see it. That makes perfect sense: it's better to be a dictator than to have to explain why some code isn't properly modularized.
• NOiV, the organisation that promotes open source and open standards in government institutions, is very careful to avoid any mention of the philosophy of Free software. Yes, it's harder to convince people on the merits of ethics, but equating Free software to "freeware" doesn't build a healthy and durable environment for it and you'll have to keep convincing them on a case by case basis.
• If a Dutch school is telling you to use a non-free format, you can (and should) report it.
• VLC is still an awesome media player, and getting more awesome even
• OpenStreetMap is getting cooler by the minute. Hopefully coming soon: secure login (https) on the website. My first track (with my Freerunner) is itching to get on there, once that's implemented.
• If you want to use OpenStreetMap data for routing, then you need some special map instead of the regular one. But that doesn't explain why the map in Navit on my Freerunner was blank all the way. I probably just configured it wrong.
• There was some interest from a guy (sorry dude, I forgot your name, let me know if you're reading this) on the Debian project in gNewSense and my Lemote Yeeloong mini-laptop. He was the only person, apart from me, who seemed genuinly interested in software freedom.
• I should really look into unit testing, code inspection and all that stuff. If your development team is larger than 3 people and you're not doing any of it, then you're probably missing out.

In summary: it wasn't a bad conference, but I expected a bit more. Not all of the lesser points are in the hands of the organisers, but they could do a bit more steering, I think. We'll see if next year will bring some improvements.