FOSDEM done, but disappointed about Mandriva..

Soo, I'm just back at my hotel after FOSDEM. It didn't seem like much people were hanging around for going out afterwards, so it ended up being me and Jeff Johnson going out eating and ending the night early. Just like last year, FOSDEM was really nice this year as well. It's amazing how many interesting people, talks and projects you get the chance to interact with and frequently having long talks and discussions that's rarely boring! :)

This year the most interesting things were numerous talks related to (not surprisingly) packaging, long and many talks about rpm5 with Jeff and other rpm5.org people, Mancoosi with Stéphane Lauriere, talks about the new dep solver zypp by Micahel Scröder of SuSE and the talk about packagekit by Richard Hughes. Lots of new things to learn, get inspiration & ideas from and wanting to make use of. :D

I also hanged out with the Centos guys for dinner last night and had some discussions and talks, very interesting, also somewhat weird, it's amazing how different organization, technical philosophy and other issues for Fedora/Centos/RedHat/* is from what I'm used to at Mandriva! Very cool to get to learn of other things besides my heavily Mandriva biased world. Biased as I am, I do have my opinions about what is correct different from much of their opinions, but not on all topics, discussing such things makes us all learn a lot and get some different perspectives that are really nice. :)

One things that was a huge disappointment this year though was the lack of Mandriva presence, last year we did at least have a non-public room with many more people from Mandriva and also people from the community. This year I think I was the only Mandriva Linux person that weren't a part of the french group. This is really sad to see, having some sort of minimal presence at such events shouldn't be that hard to do on Mandriva's behalf and it's actually quite important. What's worse though is how there didn't seem to be anyone from the (international) Mandriva Linux community there besides me, it might be just the fact that there wasn't obtained a room this year, but somehow I fear that it runs deeper than that.. Over the last year so many people has left Mandriva, important people that are missed a lot, not only that, there seems to be a lot of people within the community that seems to have either left or being less and less active and caring less. While technical things has improved over the last year, non-technical things has worsened it seems, people that would discuss and complain about things in the past seems to have stopped complaining, but to me it seems the reason for this is that they've stopped caring in general. :/ Apathy and decrease of interest seems to be a problem among those who like me have been involved for the longest time, which I personally hates the most, these are after all the people I've known and been in touch with for so long and becoming friends with. Since there's a lot of new people joining the community over the years, these issues might not be seen as new people will help make up for those becoming inactive while not being aware of or as tired of issues, it's a real shame to see as it will prevent the growth and dedication of people..

It might be just me, with different perception mixed with some sentimentality and frustration, but I think these things has gone down hill, especially since Warly, which were THE greatest and most important guy left, and also all too many other great ones left since. None the less, I still have faith in this distribution and even the company behind it, good changes has come as well over the last year and the company performs better (which is very good since me and my brother bought around 50K of shares a little while back ;p), but I still think these changes are only improving some things in short term (which is of course really needed since the company needs to stay alive and make profits;), but real changes are needed and real issues really needs to be fixed and acknowledged! Actually thinking ahead in longer terms really needs to be done and not be dismissed as mutually exclusive.. Oh well, I won't rant further about issues that might not be visible or make sense to many, might even step on someones' toes as well.. ;p I'm just a bit frustrated after putting a lot of work, passion and dedication into this distribution since the beginning of this millenium, becoming sentimental would be expected, right? :)

I anyways hope that we can do better next year, giving things priority and trying to do some planning in time should help a lot, maybe trying to apply for a room together with some other project might help out as well. Much can be done, it's just a matter of doing it! :)

I myself has just recently started to get the movitation and ability to do stuff again, so I do really hope that I finally can accomplish and realise some of my ideas and plans for things related to these things and after FOSDEM I'm even more motivated and filled with ideas and inspiration. Such events are really great! :) I sure hope to see more of you next year, there's tons of new people that has come over the years that I have yet to meet. :)

Update: It seems like I put up a bit wrong impression implying that Mandriva intentionally didn't have a room at FOSDEM which was absolutely not the case. Mandriva did apply but were rejected since applications were evaluated individually and with Mandriva lacking resources and possibility to organize as well as others, it probably weren't considered as fair to give us a room. And for a secret room as last year they didn't want to give us a non-official room some other place due to security issues from previous year. So my suggestions in this blog was rather how to have a better chance at getting a room next year. :)

Blog Home?