April 19, 2017
The Foundation kindly funded part of my travel from Tokyo to Singapore to attend FOSSASIA. I gave the “FreeBSD is not a Linux Distribution” presentation that Foundation board member, George Neville-Neil wrote for Open Source China in December. My presentation was well-attended, and I got a lot of good questions from the primarily Linux-oriented audience.
You can find a recording of my talk here.
Most of the conference program focused on Linux, blockchain, and other topics which don’t excite me all that much, however, some of the more interesting talks I attended included:
- Vaishali Thakkar from Oracle talking about using Coccinelle for automatically fixing programming bugs in the Linux kernel. We have Coccinelle in the ports tree. I look forward to
playing around with it on FreeBSD. - Roland Turner talking in the AI track about using the FPRF and FPGA in the Novena open source computing platform for doppler-shift correction in LEO satellite reception.
- I also caught a very entertaining talk about automatic mushroom farming with open technology. While not immediately applicable to me, I’d had my fill of Linux, and mushrooms are very tasty.
Throughout the conference, Foundation board member, Hiroki Sato and I talked to various people from different companies, and handed out lots of business cards. I also introduced Sato-san to the FOSSASIA organizers to ensure that FOSSASIA next year does not again conflict with AsiaBSDCon.
It was a very good conference overall, and I’m glad I finally managed to attend. I look forward to attending again next year!
– Contributed by Philip Paeps