Open Source Gamer Goes to Ontario Linux Fest 2008

Last, last weekend (October 25) I attended my first conference, Ontario Linux Fest 2008. And what an awesome event it was! The event turned out be a somewhat low key event. Not a huge number of exhibitor booths, but the Eclipse, Fedora, FOSSology, FSF, OpenStreetMap and Drupal people had setup shop there. The event featured 4 tracks, and a number of great speakers. Got to meet Jorge Castro from Canonical, Ross Turk and Daniel Hinojosa from SourceForge, Jon “maddog” Hall, Jeremy Allison from Samba, Ian Darwin and Bradley Kuhn from the Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC). It is always an amazing thing to meet the people “in the flesh”, who make a difference in the FOSS community, and read from blogs. The seminars were fantastic and inspire me to further my own open source/free software involvement.

One of the organizers, Richard Weait tried to convince me to start up a Brampton LUG. I might try it out, once I have a little bit more time. Nothing fancy mind you, just one night a month at the Coffee Culture, a few ads and a mailing list. We will see how it will go.

Also I got to go out to dinner with Bradley, the Red Hat and FoSSology folks. And thanks to Google for providing yet another free service in life, in the form of free drinks at the reception/ after-party.

So thanks guys for the awesome time. Sorry for not blogging earlier. Life keeps me busy as always. And lets make the 2009 event even larger!