The ninth edition of our little conference, and I have a horrible echo on this microphone, but I'll just try to live with it. Yeah, if you ask a conference organizer what they like best about a conference,

you will get two answers depending on when you ask them. If you ask them during the conference, they will say, in a bit of a grumpy voice, the day after. But if you ask them after the conference or a couple of months before the conference, they'll say, I like doing the opening talk, it gives me a chance to talk to all these people who are expecting something interesting

and making them wait. So, yeah, I wanted to do a long opening talk, but it's going to be a short one again. So I would like my next slide from my assistant, and not that one, that one, good. Well, the life of a conference organizer is one of recurring nightmares.

Last night, well, the night before last, I didn't sleep, I was thinking, what if no one shows up? How unbelievably stupid will I feel if I am at the bar all alone and no one will be there? Or what will it feel like to talk to an empty auditorium? It's, well, not quite empty, but it's not full enough. And then, after the nightmare phase,

there is the firefighting phase. The beer event last night, I'll talk a bit about it later, went fairly well, but after I got to the couch I was surfing, my phone started ringing, and it kept ringing. It's amazing how many things can go wrong

when you organize a conference. And then, of course, there's the solution to all this. It's caffeine, there's lots of it. Leslie tells me it tastes bad, but it's caffeine. And then there's the adrenaline, you know, keep us going. So this conference would not be possible

without our sponsors. We've got the usual suspects up there for whom we are eternally grateful. O'Reilly has their stand with books. Josette has lots and lots of books. There's even a book about small dogs, so I don't know what that does in our shipment, but she's got it. And then, novel is up on our cornerstone sponsors as well,

and then we've got all these other nice people. Networthy is Cisco, who are doing wireless. You see these people up there? They are not quite smiling yet. Once they start smiling, the wireless is working. There's currently a captive portal which speaks SSL with a self-signed certificate.

I suggest you ask one of the Cisco guys for the fingerprints before you trust it, because it is, you know, Mozilla will complain. Last night, we had our little beer event. It was little, and Google was kindly enough to sponsor some free beer. We like that very much.

So in addition to the sponsors, we like donations. We actually love donations. This year, we made the donation form easier so you can donate more and more easily. We've got beautiful t-shirts with a new logo with lots of cloudy things and rainy things. The usual O'Reilly books and pockets if you donate enough. And then tomorrow, we will do

our annual notorious donations draw. There are some Nokia gadgets to win again, some Bug Labs gadgets with ARM CPUs. You plug them together and they do shiny things for you. And then there's the more books and pockets. I think it's five books you can win. Two times five books, so if you're very lucky, you have lots of things to read.

And magazine subscriptions in various languages. So donate much and donate often and get a free t-shirt and show it to everyone. So this beer event of mine. How many people were at the beer event? Okay. How many of you are somewhat hungover?

Hmm, same crowd. Yes, nine years ago, I had this bright idea of if people are going to show up at the conference on time we won't have time to set up the conference. People will want to use wireless network and there won't be wireless network. So let's treat these people to a beer somewhere in the center of Brussels and get them hungover

so they show up a bit later. That idea backfired slightly. Every year, we bust some records, which are on the next slide if it can get there. So did anyone try to count how many people were in there? According to fire regulations, about 750 should fit in a bar at one time.

Of course, we had the bar and the bar across the road and the road and the road next to the road and I think there were people downstairs probably oozing into other streets. So many people and my beer distribution algorithm version 3.0, incorporating free beer as a storm control system, you just have to be there,

worked very well. We had a total bill of not quite 10,000 euro when I left at midnight and at three o'clock one of my phone calls was from a Swiss gentleman who asked me, does it still make sense to go to the beer event at this time? Yeah, probably, let me know if there's any people left

and then 10 minutes later he called me back and I said, it's still packed with people here. So yeah, I think the total bill was something to be proud of, thank you. And thank you Google for sponsoring free beer, wherever Leslie is, there's Leslie. Free beer is good, we like free beer.

So that was the philosophical part of this opening talk. At the info desk you find these little booklets. The booklet is your friend, it has everything you need to know about the conference in it. There's practical information about just about everything. There are talk schedules which are somewhat up to date

with reality, if I keep talking too long then they get out of sync. There's an area map in there as well if you get hungry. We have our Belgian fries somewhere out here and then there's all the local establishment with tasty stuff for you. The network, as I've mentioned, is still in a state of flux.

I still don't see any particularly smiley faces but it sends good vibes to them and it'll work. There is a, yeah I mentioned the captive portal, if that works it will point you to any last minute announcements which we might like to make like fire, fire and things like that.

The ESSID is FOSDEM with a capital F and small other letters for reasons unknown to me. And well, oh yes, I was going to say things about new things, the last minute slide. We have a cloakroom this year, you can just leave your valuable stuff in there. We're not exactly responsible for it but we will try to keep them safe.

There's a shuttle service to the south station Sunday evening. There's times in the booklets, they may or may not reflect reality but we'll do our best to make them reflect reality. And if you get lost, confused or arrested during the event, you can call this number and we will try to, well, unconfuse and un-lose you.

We don't know if you can do anything about arrested but we will certainly try. And I think that concludes my talk. Does it? No it doesn't. Oh, yes, we don't like trash. We hate cleaning up after a conference. We are not your mother but use common sense and if you see something roaming around

which shouldn't be roaming, find a bin and put it in there. So that really does conclude my talk and before I hand you over to the capable hands of our real keynote speaker, Mark Sermon, Simon wanted to say something interesting from a sunny software company who also happens to sponsor us but here is Simon.

I'm sort of setting up the laptop for Mark here. It's a laptop dance. Oh, while we're waiting for this laptop thing and the laptop dance, we'll do the Fosden dance. So can I ask everyone with a yellow t-shirt to come and join us for the Fosden dance?

We've been doing the Fosden dance from Amsterdam. Thank you. If some visitors also want to join us, they are free to do it.

It did. There we go.

Okay. We are running a bit late but moving fast. Moving fast. Don't worry, we have, but don't worry, this is Fosden. We've got a half an hour break so. Okay, so I've been tolerated for just a brief warmup here because we're worried that you might still

have a hangover. I'd like to just talk to you briefly about the problems of long-term success which unfortunately I think that the free and open source movement is beginning to suffer from. Let me try and explain what I mean by those things. 25 years ago last November,

Richard was starting the GNU project. He hadn't actually written the GPL at that stage. That was something that was gonna come 25 years ago this year. Before he did all that, there were some other folks who were working on some other code and they were working on a piece of code

that made computers work over networks. And we're talking here about deep history, about stuff that works in the distant unknown past. And when we look back at the things we did all those years ago to license the code

that we wrote 27 years ago that is still in Linux, it wasn't necessarily licensed in quite the way that seems appropriate these days. In particular, there is some code that's been hanging around in the Linux kernel for, oh, I don't know how long,

that does some interesting things. I don't know if you've run into this code. The ONC RPC code has been in existence, I think the reference implementation is now 29 years old and it still has the original license on it from 29 years ago.

Just to put that into perspective for you, that predates the BSD license. It comfortably predates the GPL. Now the license that went on that code 25 years ago was the most liberal code license you can possibly imagine if you are living 29 years ago.

It says basically, look, use this code, but please don't try and make a profit off it because, well, unless you're gonna build it into something else, that's fine. That's what the license basically says. Now a number of years ago, some fine people on the Debian legal mailing list

discovered that this license was still in there. You'll notice that this bug here was opened in 2002. So this is itself coming up for a substantial birthday. What happened back then in 2002 is that the fine guys from Debian

got in touch with Denise Cooper, who was doing my job at Sun back in those days, and said, excuse me, would you mind re-licensing this Sun RPC code over to something which is DFSG-free? Here's the license down here. So we looked at this and let me explain to you

what happens when you ask me to re-license a piece of code. I have to find someone who knows what you're talking about. And that isn't necessarily easy with a piece of code that was written in 1982 because the person who wrote it probably isn't with the company anymore.

The piece of code actually, well, no one owns it in Sun because the version of a Sun RPC that's in Debian is actually a derivative of a derivative of a derivative. And so the code that's in there has got an embedded license statement that comes from years and years ago. So with this piece of code, we looked at it and said,

we've no idea where that's from. And so the bug, the request inside Sun went to sleep. We hoped everyone would forget about it. And indeed people did for a number of years. If you look back at Debian bug 181493, you'll find it kind of went to sleep for a really long time. And then last year it woke up again.

And I got an email saying, so look, we're gonna take this code out of Debian if you don't re-license it. And so I said, well, where is this code? He said, well, it's in port lib and it's in glibc. So you're gonna take glibc out of Linux. Okay.

So we got some lawyers working on this big problem because it's not actually code that my company uses in any product at the moment. There's no product group to pay the lawyers and there's no engineer who knows the code to tell the lawyers what to actually go and investigate. So I had a bunch of people working their spare time

for about three, four months trying to work out where this code comes from. I'm delighted to be able to give you a warm up today to tell you that two days ago, I was told we can re-license the Sun RPC code so that it can get shipped in Fedora and hey, if you fancy changing glibc

a week before release in Lenny. You do want to change glibc a week before release, don't you? Say yes. No, no. So we've done. It's always good to celebrate occasions. So this is the birthday of this bug.

And let's, where are we, down here. And so we're gonna have a little celebration. It turns out that we can all live in happiness and harmony.

From here, I've got another problem to solve. So excuse me for a few weeks while I don't fix the next bug that Bdell has lined up for me out of the Debian database. I've discovered that we've gotta change Sun's terms of employment so that our employees can contribute to open source communities. We should have done that maybe five years ago, but it turned up when we bought MySQL that we had a problem.

So I hope to be able to come back to FOSDEM next year and tell you how I've changed our terms of employment so all 30,000 employees can join open source communities. But this will have to do for now. So without any further ado, we'll see whether this computer is working here for Mark.

Yeah, I'm gonna tell a joke.