Friday morning I had my last exam so got at the conference at about 11. At 11:05 Mr. Popescu started talking about IBM and how it supports Linux. The most important thing to remember is that IBM supports Red Hat Linux and SUSE Linux and only those two distributions. Others, like Debian, Ubuntu or Gento are known to work, but that’s about it. He briefly explained what various series mean (Z comes from zero downtime, P comes from performance and so on) and talked some more about the quality of the IBM products.

Dragos had a couple of problems with his laptop and the projector, but he managed to briefly talk about WebEyz, a remote surveillance product that’s about to be launched soon. In March they’ll release the code under the GPL license, however they’ll adopting some sort of mixed license just like MySQL. He told the audience they are using Perl, PostgreSQL and Debian (actually the whole software is a nice .deb package).

The security on Linux presentation was a fiasco. Ionut Boldizsar roughly mentioned some key aspects regarding security like “agility and flexibility when responding to threats”. He talked about firewalls, IDS and IPS, antispam, antivirus and other anti* stuff but he tried to cover a lot of subjects in small amount of time so he didn’t go into any specifics. I thought it was a fiasco because he mentioned a couple of times that “[he doesn't] really know this very well” or “[he hasn't] done this for a very long time” or that “there are others in this room with a lot more security knowledge than [him]“, all major no-no’s when doing presentations especially on sensible subjects like security. In my view, he never really answered the question “is Linux a system designed to be secure?”.

In the beginning of the BitDefender presentation, I thought Mr. Mitu was going to do a Lessig-style presentation. However, he moved to a more classic approach and talked only about the new Image Spam Filter they developed. He talked about the problems with image spam and some anti-image spam approaches. It’s a brand new product, but it seems to have a pretty high accuracy (they were pushing numbers around 97% image spam accuracy).

Aurelian Popa is a good speaker from the .NET community. Not the best one (that title belongs to Ciprian Jichici in my view), but a good one nonetheless. In the conference agenda that was handed out, IDG wrote “OS vs. Microsoft” so many thought it was going to be a heated debate. Aurelian started out by saying that he wasn’t going to talk about the battle between the Redmond company and open-source, but show how the two worked together. He talked about WiX, FlexWiki, CodeFlex and Microsoft’s Open Source Development Labs (few know that former Gentoo leader Daniel Robbins is a Microsoft employee since mid 2005). He talked about PHP for the .NET Framework and a couple of other interesting things. He handed out books as prizes when asking trivial questions regarding .NET (like “What is .NET?” or “What is Mono?”). There were a couple of Microsoft employees in the room and they took some questions from the audience. (A funny thing: Ionut talked about the Romanian Linux User Group as being the largest user community in Romania with 800-1000 members. RONUA, the .NET user group, has around 1300 users and growing.)

The guy from Sun was a brand-new employee. He was hired a couple of days ago and he was so nervous that he had to read the entire presentation. His talk was obviously the most boring one, although he had a golden subject, Solaris 10. When people asked if it was free (as in “no charge”), he said that you could build your own OS from scratch, but then you lost any guarantee that it would work as intended. He could have done a killer job showing some DTrace in action or tackling a more specific subject. Unfortunately, he had to do the sales talk and everybody could sense that (mostly because he didn’t seem to be a great salesman :) ).

OSCAR or Open Source Coders chAllenge for Romanians is a really interesting project. Alina was really scared that she might mess things up, but with the help of Dragos Manac she explained OSCAR to the audience and asked the enterprises to help them out. We had a really brief talk afterwards when I asked her if she knew about eLiberatica. One of the teachers she works with, Mr. Sorin Buraga, is one of the 50 members in the eLiberatica Basecamp Project so she knew about the conference and that she’ll send you a mail regarding OSCAR.

After witnessing a couple of talks, I must say I’m quite surprised that most speakers seemed to have no experience whatsoever. We need good or even great speakers at eLiberatica and I’m afraid that the lack of experience might undermine the efforts to put together a couple of renowned speakers.

I think since you will attend the event, would be enough help if you are going to talk to the people about our initiative. You know, small-talk ;)
I’m waiting for your feedback from the event and what we can learn from there and apply to our :)

Regarding eLiberatica T-shirts, I was thinking at this aspect, for the conference. We’ll see. We have such a nice logo, would look great on a white T-shirt.