I've attended FOSDEM 2004, it was a Fantastic oportunity to meet other European Mozillan Hackers.
I did my crypto duty too and assisted the key signing party - funny thing to do.
So I got there mainly for Mozilla related reason , as I help Camino the best I can. What happened :
Saturday:
Got a presentation of Mozilla-Europe the goal the association has. Where It will go, what it wants to achieve. I became a member for 30 €, and got a Mozilla-Europe T-shirt.
Then Gerv talked about the foundation itseft. Very intersting espcially the Q&A session. Staff members is reduced to 10 ! I've raised concerned about the .msi file format and did not have to finish my question, gerv already knew about the issue. If someone has simple steps to create .msi files for mozilla please post it here or try to give this simple procedure in .msi bugs close/opene in bugzilla.
I met the maintainer of enigmail, He came from switzerland. We had people from France, Germany, Belgium, Netherland , U.K., Switzerland and Italy - A real european meeting. Enigmail is an extension to Mozilla suite/Thunderbird that lets you encrypt/decrypt/sign/verify signature of mails with Gnu Privacy Guard.
Being the Camino guy everyone wanted to know what the state of camino was. MoZEurope members wanted to find localized builds, in order to add links on their website. Also everybody kept asking why camino, is it a duplicate effort, so I kindly explained it was no duplicate, ad people doing it where doing it for fun.
I met people from geckozone, a french org trying to translate to french every mozilla software available (I should say clients btw). I showed one of them how to enter a .app application on mac os X.
At night we had an informal mozilla mail - reminded me with beeurope's geektea. You can talk/meet people that way.
Sunday:
We had a minimo demo/presentation without slide. A Powerbook running linux problem. But very interesting in terms of footprint and options to compile mozilla --without-xul that's almost finish but not yet.
I met my friend hub and we talked about abiword, work and life.
Then Alex gave us a memorable speech on mozilla as a development platform. He showed us a tools that connect like telnet to a running mozilla instance, then you control mozilla from that telnet sesion. He showed us the power of Xul, Xlb, javascript and SVG. That made me want to build an SVG enabled version of Camino.
Then Bernd gave us an exellent talk on how to triagge make test case for the layout bugs , and specally his speciallity, tables.
Daniel explained what NVu was too.
