Wafers vs technology at FOSDEM 2016

I learned about the FOSDEM conference around November, when the OpenStreetMap newsletter received a proposal to submit reports to the Geospatial stream. I sent a request about mobile map editors (which will soon include MAPS.ME), in December it was confirmed, and Mail.Ru Group sent me on a business trip. Since this is my first time, in the topic of open source I “found a mask at a construction site” and I don’t know anyone, instead of fruitful communication with friends, which takes about half the time at the State of the Map conferences in Oscar, I wrote notes to write in this text later . Under the cut a lot of words and photos.

Arrived on Thursday morning, mostly in order to have time to prepare a report. In MAPS.ME, all of January was in a hurry, we were writing at the same time three grand features, so the hands never reached home. But in the hotel, especially after midnight, the work is arguing.



Brussels public transport. Take a taxi from the airport for half an hour and 50 euros. But you can go down to the buses and get there for 4.50. Or to trains, but they are not in the STIB network: it is not known what time it will be, and you will find yourself at the central station, from where you will still have to get by tram or bus. In the city, regular tickets for one hour cost 2.50 for the driver or 2.10 for the machines in the subway. Especially on Friday night, he ran away and bought. These are such pieces of paper, at the entrance to the bus you roll, and time is stamped there. It is a pity that from the hotel to the university by transport (tram + bus) only 15 minutes. To the Delirium pub, where the social event took place , about the same. Brussels is a small city by Moscow standards. Some participants who settled on the other side of the city walked to FOSDEM.



In the morning I walked around the area, rented beautiful houses. All days the weather was sloppy: it was constantly raining, sometimes the wind rose. I don’t know why, but I expected the sun and heat. He drew attention to the institutions on the ground floors. It seems that on crowded streets the first floors are never residential: in every house there is a shop, or atelier, or restaurant, or realtors. The houses are narrow, and there are many of them, and the same ones are rarely found. Construction is everywhere, somewhere the rails are shifted, somewhere the walls are plastering. After a long selection of a place for lunch, I run into kebab: large portions and simple code. When he left, it began to darken and the rain intensified. Of course, I left the umbrella in Moscow.



What was in the pub? Crush. And beer, of course. Belgian beer is excellent, although strong: two half-pints were enough for me. Beer was given out for tokens, which were sold at the entrance for 4 euros. Very convenient, no need to throw money through the counter. In the closing presentation, the organizers mentioned something about 6 thousand tokens sold. This is about 3 tons of beer - you can imagine how many people were. Two floors, shot under the event, were crowded, an alley on the street too. How did I manage to stumble upon the only acquaintance at this conference? I gave him business cards, which I printed a little earlier at the same time as mine. I’m tired of constantly forgetting them. However, in three days he gave only one, out of a hundred printed. It was necessary to take MAPS.ME stickers, they are cool and always fly apart instantly.



Brussels is a French-speaking city, but speech was in all languages. I rarely heard Russian, but several times, having started a conversation in English, I discovered that the interlocutor came from Russia. We are standing, discussing the drop-in alternative to Dropbox without a monthly subscription, the third person is leaving, and the interlocutor is: “By the way, I’m Dmitry, it’s possible in Russian.” Or on Saturday at breakfast in a hotel, Yuri somehow identified Russian in me, but we decided to continue in English, because it’s a little strange in a European country to communicate in Russian.

It is interesting that some Russians in Europe seem disappointed, complain that everything is bad and is only getting worse, and they are thinking of returning to Russia. Well, well, everything is fine with us.

Saturday

The opening and closing reports are simple: hello, thanks to the people on the list, and here are some interesting statistics. 52 streams, 568 speakers, 310 hours of video recordings. Suddenly I discovered that the gear with eyes that was stamped on the arm at the entrance to Delirium is the logo of the conference.



A break of 15 minutes - and hello, Lennart (links to pages with links and, soon, with videos). According to the schedule, today I have constant dashes between the audiences and only small breaks in the afternoon. They sell FOSDEM T-shirts for 25 euros (this year they are black, but expensive, everyone else sells T-shirts for 15), there are a lot of interesting books from O'Reilly, but they will obviously be cheaper on Amazon.

Lennart talks about everything. Everyone except for Gentoo has Systemd (and Gent adherents boast of this). I expected to see many unusual presentation systems (and not PowerPoint + LibreOffice, as at other conferences), but the system with small text on a white background was puzzled. A neighbor suggested that this is Beamer , a module for LaTeX. Lennart talked about systemd, nspawn, sd-dhcp. Currently working on Unified Control Group Hierarchy: "Docker is not compatible." He listened for 20 minutes and when he started moving on to really interesting things, such as DNSSEC , he fled to Python.



The room is predictably crammed. Another five minutes - and they will hang the sign "lol, a good try, but look, it's better online." Raising hands: it turned out that almost everyone started with the C language, and few people with Pascal or BASIC. They turned off the whole world, otherwise the screen is not visible. Now the speaker is not visible, but the Python code is the main thing. Presentation system just go nuts! Just the highlighted code, press the button - it is executed, press still - the next slide with the code.

I learned about zip (), which merges two arrays into tuples, and with dict () turns them, obviously, into dict. Function parameters by default are initialized only once, therefore, if arg = [] is done, the array can be grown and grown inside the function. A simple except will catch KeyboardInterrupt and will not stop the program, so you need except Exception. You can write 10 <x <20 <y <30.The report is really about the very basics of python, but I didn’t even know any little things.

Yuri Numerov got lost, but the good news is that 11:01. We found a speaker at the lightning talk, and now he ran and ran, since Yuri was found. Presentation on the classic reveal.js. It seems to be programming tic-tac-toe. I hope in real time in the editor, as a Vaadin employee at JavaOne. No, in the slides. Moreover, due to a delay of ten minutes, it is very fast and you read the figs. Uses only system libraries, but where does DO ('clear') come from? There is not even a check to complete the game, a simple four-line loop with raw_input. I hope for some spectacular leap in the second half of the report, such as once - and Nethack.



No, Tetris. A remark about the speed independent of the speed of the computer - God, now is 2000, or what? Made an eternal loop with checking time.time (). This time calls os.system ('clear'). Okay, and now he just plays his Tetris on stage. I understood why two-dimensional navigation in reveal.js is good: if you are late in time, you can quickly skip to the next topic without ending the current one.

The assistant, in addition to the usual cards “has N minutes left”, has “repeat the question” on the back. Because cameras record sound only from the speaker. Speakers are hung with wireless lapel microphones, but there are no speakers in the room, the sound goes only to the recording.



Exit the U housing directly to the snack. And there, of course, Belgian waffles! Passing Belgian waffles is excusable only in one case: if you already have a waffle in your hand. In short, I was late for a report about VLC , there it was full. In the next room, with lawyers, there is some not very interesting topic about licenses of dependent packages. I’m sitting in an empty room from under the lightning talks, I see on Twitter that the Mozillovites are distributing cookies . In half an hour I fly to them!



I barely made my way to the license room. Broadcasts Dave Neary, not a lawyer. A tall man is sitting in front of me. Pancake. Dave is far away without a microphone. Raising hands: there are ten lawyers in the room. The story about changing the license from BSD 2c to Apache is fully compatible, and everything is ok, but the project participant is not happy that he was not asked, although he agrees with BSD. Just reading a patent is already a legal risk, so lawyers do not advise reading them. Important link: fossmarks.org , there is a focus on model trademark guidelines .

Since there was a hole in my schedule, I read what would happen next and stayed for researchsoftware distribution operations: when are the GPL conditions included? Swedish schools require children 9-12 years old to sign an agreement prohibiting the transfer of equipment and copying programs. Yes, since they are children, the contract is void, but this is the subject of another conversation. In addition, the GPL, under which programs are licensed, prohibits restriction of distribution rights.



100% of respondents said that it was always obvious whether there was a spread or not, but in specific cases, half said that it was, half that it was not. Important slides: Spectrum (2/3) and Related Questions. The main problem is when the user does not own the equipment or the program is flashed in the car. If they gave open source software for an hour and on a computer, did they distribute it? GPL v2 uses the term distribution; in GPL v3 it has been replaced by propagation / conveying. Regulation 2009/24 / EC: “distribution includes rental”.

The main question, of course, is how to separate the transfer of equipment and the transfer of software. Extreme cases from judicial practice: set-top boxes, when rent was not considered transfer of software, and the case when advertisingSoftware with parts of the GPL code was considered proliferation. There is a study that suggests that GPL = AGPL, since the distribution of functionality is, in fact, also the distribution of the application. In practice, it is worth starting from the fact that in doubtful cases we consider everything to be spread.

In front of me is a man with an awesome. I always know this interface, I spent almost a year with it.



I didn’t have time because of the long juridoklad to the story about homebrew , I have to look at the recordings (broadcast in places does not work). I tried to get food, but only waffles were quickly issued. Again. In other cars queues about 40-50 people. Plus an unpleasant rain with the wind, because of which I do not feel like leaving the H. Building. I'll try to hold on the waffles for a couple more hours and get normal food with meat later.

Now there are two reports in the Mozilla room: about feedback processing and about http / 2. The first is by Robert Kaiser, with whom we already talked about this topic in a pub on Friday. The bottom line is that they only collect the necessary data, and not everything in a row, to save and after three years to find something. Collection methods: passive (updates) and active (telemetry and caches). Statistics: Telemetry Dashboards . Plus the report - convinces that Mozilla does not collect anything personal and superfluous. Minus - few details. The author yesterday told a lot of interesting things about beer. Like how they found that adblock slows down for everyone, and found the reason in the browser. Desktop crash users send in 40% of cases. Plug-in crashes ship at about 1%.



The educational program about HTTP / 2 begins, and the hellish crowd is approaching. There are few reports for beginners at the conference: no one will explain what virtualization is or how to build your distribution. What is HTTP / 2: asynchronous requests, server push, all on one tcp connection. 17% of requests in firefox / https already go through / 2. Half of the content on the network is through it. The main problem is that it is https, certificates are not so easy to obtain. The SPDY Indicator plugin adds lightning to sites using SPDY or / 2. Projected acceleration of 20-60%. They plan to solve some problem with client certificates and improve the cookie mechanism. In the future there will be / 3, and faster.

Many listeners on Telegram screens encounter IRC, and certainly in the console via irssi. Only once saw the WhatsApp web interface.



There was a break in my schedule, went to the wagons with food, but the queue is still pipets. I took another waffle, went to the K building, where the main stands are: all Linux distributions, all virtualization and open software. I forgot about the Mozilla with cookies, but I did not find them. Where they hid is incomprehensible. Judging by the photos on Twitter, somewhere there was a long row of stands with open desktop software.



I decided to go on a half-hour storyabout the profitability of the PyPy project. They didn’t want the cartridge corporation (they are not in the city where the author lives), they received a European Union grant of one million euros for R&D, but a bunch of pieces of paper had to be filled out. Crowdfunding gave 150 thousand. Consulting helps financially, but creates strange restrictions on the application: it needs to work, but not too well to require 10 thousand for consulting. But it’s easy to sell, showing a monetary gain for the customer. An interesting analogy with the denouement that needs to be built: you can sit on the side of the road and ask for donations for the road, or you can find a carrier who uses this road and who is interested in reconstruction. You may have to dig a couple of holes yourself.



What's at the conference with food? There was no dedicated cafe or catering, as is often done, because there are thousands of people. For the most part, all were purchased at mobile kiosks on the main mall. There were Belgian waffles, more waffles on a stick, some kind of vegan grass, sandwiches and chicken fries. I bought the latter, and this was the worst decision on this trip. Not only is it expensive, it’s also uncomfortable to eat, not enough meat, and the whole was doused with oil. Fu Fu, tomorrow only waffles and sandwiches. Nearby was a building with a cafe-bar on the second floor. They also sold sandwiches (as well as beer, cola and coffee), but they were cold. They say they were tastier than street ones.



Seeing a fifteen-minute window in Birds of Feather sessions, he wrote there an “OpenStreetMap Community Meeting”. Just see if there are a lot of osmeres. In general, besides me, only one person appeared, turned out to be Russian from Sweden. We talked about his android application for collecting data on altitude and other attributes of houses. There were also two employees of the humanitarian team OSM ( HOT ), with whom I am unfamiliar (and who do not know about OSMF). They were sitting at the HOT booth, but it is not clear why: there is nothing for the team to sell. Tomorrow, Blake Girardot, vice president of the organization, will make a closing plenary report on their activities.



Reagan McDonald talks about tracking protectionin Firefox. All really track. There are tracking companies, there is a collection of all the information (RapLeaf, Acxiom). A business of tens of billions of dollars, so companies cannot work to protect against tracking. Plus, governments also want to know everything (see Snowden's revelations).

A guy came in, talking about the technique. Cookies, especially 3party. It’s easy to disable, but there is fingerprinting: we consider it unique in the set of properties of the system and browser. The Lightbeam plugin shows who can track. In Europe, once obligated to notify about cookies, they are now discussing the General Data Protection Regulation : no cookies, no fingerprinting, no logs. New Firefox feature: "report attack page". The participants saw him on the website of the Friday pub Deliriumbecause of the malvari. Mozilla decided to do the same for trackers. Company Disconnect maintains a list of them. Soon, all third-party trackers in private mode will be blocked by default, including Google Analytics (there will be instructions on how to connect analytics correctly). In normal mode - use Tor.



At this point, I went out to catch a story about how organizations are trying to monetize open source and are killing the community. But there was a full house, and they didn’t let me in again because of a full house, so I spat and went home on the bus.

It’s nine in the evening. You need to shorten your report, draw slides and read aloud at least twice (seven is better, but it's also important to sleep). And do not write this report as much as you can already.

Sunday

I got out late and decided to walk to the university. Only half an hour, twice as long as taking a tram. The weather is still bad, dripping rain, but not the same as in St. Petersburg. I went down to the market in Flageé Square, there was only food and socks. I still can’t find slippers, so as not to walk around the hotel in boots. In the evening I discovered that there is a comic book store in the square, but I did not notice it. Then, past the lakes to the university, and immediately to the AW building, where in the hall around the perimeter showed the little things (sorry, not very interested), and on the second floor there was a stream of Geospatial.



Report on location and maps in Gnome. Geoclue2 Library(it’s unfortunate that all sorts of Firefox and Qt are still on the first version). The accuracy of Mozilla Location Services is about 100-300 meters, thank you very much. The ModemManager service determines the position on 3G with an accuracy of a couple of kilometers (everything is better than GeoIP).

Gnome Maps uses Nominatim for geocoding, but they want to raise their server. While there are restrictions on the frequency of requests and auto-completion does not work. Libchamplain library - for drawing OSM. You can check in from 4sq / fb / twi directly from the card. To build routes use Graphhopper, there is a pesha and a bicycle. There is no satellite backing at all, obviously not Bing or Mapbox. The alpha version already knows how to open GeoJSON files.



Now about the results of GSoC 2015in OSGeo. The organization was founded in 2006 by the main developers of the geosoft. The report is a banal listing of this year's projects, who did what. Screenshots in places. There are many girls among students. All 15 students coped with the tasks - unprecedentedly, before there were 1-3 failures. Two girls spoke in turn, partly like an award ceremony, but they did not award anyone, of course, ended up with nothing.



Tuukka from the Helsinki administration is working on public transport routes on a map (OSM is an important part). The current system, called the HSL Journey Planner , counts the route from stop to stop, 100,000 users per day. A feature of Finland is its low population density. Make a new route planner with map, Digitransit. It works not only in Finland, but also in Amsterdam, for example. For demonstration on FOSDEM I downloaded all of Belgium (I did not find Brussels separately). There is routing for pedestrians and bicycles, route directions, etc. A very cool feature is driving along the bus route. You can see which stop you are approaching. True, the location is calculated on a schedule, there is no GPS on the buses. At the heart of GTFS, they came up with their own transport location query scheme and their own GraphQL for route information. Everything is on the github . Six developers and an outside designer, one betting programmer and one architect work on the project. Beta in the spring, opening at the end of the year. The motto “making it easier to hack public services" sounds ambiguous. Use OpenTripPlanner, the main open source software for working with public transport.

The next one I told about the map editor in MAPS.ME, and I don’t really like it when they only talk about software, so I connected the phone to the poppy and broadcast its screen, showing everything with examples. There is no microphone in ordinary rooms, only in large ones, so people probably didn’t hear half of what I said. But they laughed on the right slides - and then the bread. I said: after the report, you need to leave the audience and communicate with everyone who has questions for half an hour. At such a large conference, people quickly disappear.



I decided to relax and stayed on a report about Flight Simulator. The OpenStreetMap map is used as a texture, and the geometry of the runways is also pulled out. 3D houses, roofs, STL models. The simulator works in the browser via WebGL (three.js). Clouds and fog. The mechanics of flying through JBSim, supports joysticks. Alas, the project is far from complete, there is no demo: the author deals with it in his spare time. He talked about the simulator and did not show a single picture - all in vain.

Now about the pluginfor OpenLayers 3 to connect the Cesium library, which draws a globe. Listeners are registered, layers are synchronized. It turns out the same globe, but running OL3. You can add layers and objects. Lines along the relief surface, textures from raster layers. In order not to render all the points at a time, the author added fog: at the same time, you can render tiles of lower quality. He is trying to keep up with the development of OL3 and Cesium, he is thinking about client-side re-projection of vector and raster (in Europe we don’t have a common web-mercator, everyone is sitting on their convenient projections). They asked from the audience how to make a layer of meshes, which is used for relief, from SRTM. It turned out that there are still no open tools for this.



I hurried to a lectureBrian “redbeard” about CoreOS, which I was advised earlier, but, although I managed, it didn’t fit into the room: they let one-third of the queue go, then they hung a “busy” sign. Well then, I went to dinner. This time he was taught and took a chicken sandwich. Then he called home - how cool it is that there is VoIP, you can chat for a long time and for free. And the time has come to choose the next lecture.

It was very hard to choose between the OpenDocument format and the DCO lecture, a replacement for the classic CLA, but in the end I decided that about the first I would be less likely to want to learn from other sources. "ODF means power." Since 2017, the Dutch government wants to translate all correspondence with the population into numbers. And after about ten minutes it’s flooding about how hard it is for the government to switch to open formats and that there are still many more MS Office formats in the document flow. I was hoping for a technical lecture. Document Liberation Project



InitiativeIt tries to pull data from legacy formats into ODF (i.e., makes converters). A brief description of the format, history of versions (only three, the last - 1.2, added an electronic digital signature). The format committee looks at user reviews, in a bug tracker, etc. The problem with large software developers is that they do not want standardization, because these are costs and fewer reasons for users not to go to competitors. Applications should handle ODF carefully so as not to break XML. Sometimes they build plugfest(events in Western Europe), where developers verify that everyone works with ODF the same way. Judging by the slide with an example, the Calligra editor has the best format support (the only one has drawn wavy strikethrough). But the number of failed tests is approximately the same with LibreOffice. The dream is to do something like the Acid test so that everyone can see for themselves the level of format support. And an analog of caniuse.com to see who supports what. Actually, they are working on it.



I ran to a report about license selection sites; judging by the nameshould be a fascinating report. But he didn’t make it: he met Felix from Nicaragua at the stand of the OSM humanitarian team, whom he talked to on the radio last New Year’s broadcast, and Blake Girardot, vice president of HOT. He was very nervous in anticipation of his report and was unhappy that none of the ordinary public people came and he had to do this nervous work - to make a closing plenary report. Felix reminded about his project of the first complete map of OT routes in the capital of Nicaragua and showed that they are promoting MAPS.ME in their community. He asked why we do not want to add notes, as in OsmAnd. Very convenient. In the meantime, you have to use bookmarks for mapping - just like me.

Okay, I got out, being late for ten minutes, I could get there. But I decided to spend this last break to run for a LibreOffice t-shirt. I would take a hoodie, but they are too thin. So I waited half past four, went to the main hall. Along the way, I bought a waffle: walking past Belgian waffles is a sin.



I came to the last 15 minutes of an unexpectedly bright report about LibreOffice Online. Just on the problems of browsers, in particular about the impossibility of managing the print dialog. The speaker showed different cool things in the local version of the package from ownClowd(Apparently, a worthwhile thing, once it works from the localhost). Collaborative editing, Android ownCloud, opening files via WebDAV, etc. Thanks to all the developers, listing who did what. In particular, someone started importing Apple Keynote 6 files. From the questions I learned that the interface is drawn with tiles, without trying to use exclusively HTML, as in Google Docs. This package is like MS Office 365.

Closing report- in a full room, of course, - from Blake. He is engaged in operational work, so a report on how HOT works inside. How different branches are connected, how they use a bunch of open source tools. He told about the basics of humanitarian mapping, as people in Asia and Africa take to the streets with printouts of maps and collect data and GPS points. And not after a natural disaster, but before, because then there is no time for this. Showed the latest version of Tasking Manager , with highlighting priority areas. Written in Pyramid + SQLAlchemy + GeoAlchemy.



Millions of people just don’t get on the map. Gekedou (Guéckédou), a city in Africa of 250 thousand people - more than Novgorod. It was marked by two roads, but almost five hundred buildings were painted in five days by the community. Screenshotspectacular, applause in the hall. Another thing about another city, again clapping. Enough already, the usual thing for OpenStreetMap. He showed editors, JOSM and iD (“these are the initials of the first developer” - lol, no, it was Richard Fairhurst). Showed Export Tool for creating uploads. He talked about Nepal and Kathmandu, got to OpenAerialMap (the public piggy bank of orthophotography), and already somehow began to tire. Yes, HOT is a very big project. He showed drones for orthophotos, which were used in the spring in Vanuatu. He finished an impressive slide with a map of the world with the marked regions where HOT or Missing Maps worked, and thanked the participants, because without open source software there would be no humanitarian mapping.

Then the questions, and it is clear that Blake is not in vain the vice president: he answers fully, accurately and quickly. A good phrase in one of the answers: "9 times out of 10, the best thing to do is map".



Finally, everything. The people rushed to the exit, but the last presentation was left, with FOSDEM statistics. Predictably huge numbers, 12 organizers, under a hundred assistants, about 600 speakers - and a huge crowd of participants that no one counted. The conference is open, you come and listen, without registration. 4,5 thousand unique MAC addresses, but judging by the diagrams , there were about 7 thousand participants. Terabytes of data downloaded via wi-fi and 600 GB sent ( network statistics here ). We recorded a half terabyte of video and have already begun to upload the first videos. Unfortunately, a small part of Saturday's entries disappeared.

I thought that there would be an after party, but no, not for the same crowd. The second time in Delirium I would not go. Everyone went home, someone went to a dinner party, I, having lost all my friends, went to the store for chocolate and to the hotel.



The next morning we still talked with Yuri at breakfast. He correctly noted that the conference did not come to listen to reports, but to communicate with people. Alas, with my facial memory and non-involvement in the FOSS community, there is nothing special to catch. More than half of the reports viewed were not interesting, because I went to a more or less familiar and it turned out that there was not much new. You need to choose some unfamiliar space, such as OpenStack and micronuclei ("buy a used overlock", yeah). Walk on the stands and start a conversation with every second representative. Be sure to wear a jersey logo shirt for breakfast. Ask speakers and catch them after lectures, at the same time ask who they will advise to communicate with. Arrive at FOSDEM 2017.

Links to other reports

• Jelle Haandrikman arrived just a day, but brought out of the conference much more than me.
• Jeremy Bennett spoke about the reports visited on Saturday and Sunday .
• Radek Pazdera also retold several reports that caught him.
• For Shane Kerr, it was a DNS conference.
• Anjana Sofia Vakil posted her notes , without intersections with my schedule.
• Impressions of Johan Van de Wauw from the Geospatial section , which he oversaw.
• Siderite Zackwehdex disappointed with reports .
• Hello from ReactOS (I didn’t dare to talk to them because ).
• Mark Keating stood at the Perl booth both days .
• Brian Proffitt also went to the Linux Expo in California and talked about the difference.
• Vasil Kolev worked in a video recording team , shares schemes.
• Peter Van Eynde of Cisco shares traffic statistics .
• #Fosdem hashtag Twitter feed : lots of pics and enthusiasm.
• Fifty interviews on Hacker Public Radio: one , two , three , four .

PS Fear and horror on #fosdem: someone signed a key on the basis of a fake passport .