Free SFD Saturday in Brno

On Saturday, we organized the first Software Freedom Day event in Brno, Czech Republic. As I wrote in my previous posts, we decided to take a slightly different approach and picked talks that weren’t focused on software itself. And I think it was a nice change. After all speakers delivered six interesting talks:

• 20 Years of Linux – From a Student Project to the World-Wide Successful Operating System – because Linux celebrated its 20th birthday just recently I prepared a tour all those years pointing out the most important milestones.
• Linux in a Pocket (Martin Martix Holec) – Martix is the chairman of Openmobility foundation and knows a lot about the matter. Everyone knows Android or MeeGo and he talked mainly about other less famous open platforms and devices.
• Why Students Should Contribute to Free Software (Jarda Řezník) – Jarda is a good example how you can get a job due to working on an open source project. He worked, as a student, on a KDE/Qt project and got a job in Red Hat. Now, he, as a redhatter, offers thesis topics to students.
• OpenStreetMap (Filip Dominec) – This talk was particularly interesting. I was aware of this project, but didn’t have a clue what it was capable of. Calculating best bike tours based on distance, elevation change, road surface? That’s cool!
• Economic Aspects of (Software) Patents – Another talk given by me. I’m not a lawyer, but I just wanted to speak out a few thoughts on patent-free development that patent-free environment can be very incentive for inventors and developers, especially in software development.
• Localization of Drupal – The last talk was on localization of the well-known CMS. Unfortunately it was too short as we were running out of time.

There were about 35 attendants which was a success regarding a beautiful weather that was in Brno for the whole weekend. All talks were open for discussion and there was a lot of discussion indeed. So much that we sometimes had to cut them off because we were behind the schedule. Throughout the event, there were two computers with SelfTest made by Ivana and Jan Hutařovi which tested knowledge of GNU project and free software this time. Three people with the best score were given SFD t-shirts. Others weren’t sorry. Everyone could grab a DVD with Fedora or Ubuntu, Fedora and SFD stickers, Open Source & Praxe magazine etc.

After the talks and group photo, we moved to Plzeňský dvůr where the “Linux in Brno”  and “Czech Ubuntu Community” meeting took place. The whole event ended late in the night after we had loaded data about SFD to a dead drop we found.

You can find more pictures in my photo gallery.