Report from AsiaBSDCon

The FreeBSD Foundation was a Platinum Sponsor of AsiaBSDCon which was held in Tokyo, Japan from March 22-25. Hiroki Sato, the General Chair of the conference, provided the following status report.

AsiaBSDCon 2012, the 7th BSD conference in Asia, was held on March 22-25, 2012, in Tokyo, Japan. This conference consists of 4 days: a 2-day tutorial/meeting session and a 2-day paper session. There were 8 tutorials (6 in English and 2 in Japanese) and the number of students were 4-20 for each. The paper session had 11 papers and 1 keynote. The number of attendees was 105.

This year’s keynote was “Embedded Technology and BSD UNIX in Japan” by Shozo Takeoka, the founder of AXE, Inc., a vendor which provides custom-ordered network equipment based on BSD, middleware for cellphones, embedded BSD, and embedded Linux to major home appliance and digital camera manufacturers in Japan.

In the 2-day meeting session George Neville-Neil and I held a half-day Vendor Summit. About 30 people attended the session and talks were given in English and Japanese by George (past Vendor Summmit), myself (Foundation), Brooks Davis (toolchain), Michal Dubiel (Semihalf), Masaru Oki (Internet Initiative Japan), and Shozo Takeoka (what and why of BSD-BA). Shozo Takeoka, myself, and others are planning to set up an organization “BSD-BA (BSD Business Association)”, a Japanese BSD consortium.

Overall, everything went well. And it is notable that there have been several moves to improve the situation of Japanese vendors using BSD. I am also working towards this goal and will keep the Foundation up-to-date.

The tentative date for the next AsiaBSDCon is March 14-17, 2013.