Linux Days 2012 Day One

On Saturday the openSUSE Conference 2012 began. The fourth annual meeting of the openSUSE Community is taking place in Prague, Czech Republic at the CVUT University.

After a relaxing time on Friday evening at the pre-event party at Cafe Traverza, the team and attendees kicked off the conference with a keynote from openSUSE Team lead Agustin Benito Bethencourt, on the opportunities facing Linux Distributions with small and medium-sized enterprises.

With tracks at Linux Days spanning openSUSE and Gentoo Linux projects, Future Media examining the legal and cultural aspects of Free Software, and Linux Days offering a wide range of talks in Czech, there was something for everyone.

Some noted that due to the increased size and scope it felt more like FOSDEM or another generic FLOSS event than an openSUSE event, but the Monday and Tuesday sessions promise dedicated time for the project and its community.

In Defensive Publications, Armijn Hemel spoke about the dangers facing Free Software projects due to software patents, and the opportunity to protect ourselves by using projects like linuxdefenders.org.

Lydia Pintscher of WikiMedia Deutschland presented the challenge in opening up participation in WikiData projects to everyone in Wikidata - Wikimedia going structured data.

Georg Greve ended his talk What you don’t understand will still control you by pointing out that these days, little has more influence on the world than software. Those writing software are the modern sorcerers; and we need more sorcerers on the side of Freedom.

The evening finished with a party at Klub Lavka. Despite a few communications failures over the catering, a good time was had by all.