OpenExpo 2009 Winterthur

Although the feedback from the openmoko-community was non-existent I nevertheless decided to make a trip to Winterthur and attend the OpenExpo Social Event. To raise awareness and do some advertisement I was wearing my OpenMoko T-shirt. Unfortunately the reactions I got were rather negative the most common question I had to answer was probably “Is it dead yet?” or “when will it die?". My answer was of course that it’s alive and doing well. That SHR is getting usable as a daily phone. That #gta02-core makes good progress and breaks now ground in the territory of Open Hardware Design.

To my surprise I actually also met 2 active community members. Sebastian Spaeth (spaetz) from the SHR Team and Ben Hagen who was responsible for the OpenMoko booth at previous OpenExpo’s.

Besides these OpenMoko related contacts I also had some good conversations with Adriaan de Groot a FSFE employee and KDE hacker. He ported KDE to OpenSolaris so we talked about OpenSolaris, software patents and the relationship between the FSF and the FSFE.

On the downside it didn’t seem like there were a lot of people who support the suckless philosophy. The OpenBSD folks are probably the closest ones to share the same kind of spirit. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to talk to them at their booth (I should have asked how the pcc development is going on) and couldn’t find them later at the social event.

I was rather sceptical of the event but the few interesting discussion made it a worthwhile stay.

Marc