OpenBSD Presence at Swiss LinuxDays

Julien Mabillard writes about OpenBSD at LinuxDays (May 21, 22):

As a long time OpenBSD user (since 2.4), I have been pleased to be there at the LinuxDays event in Geneva, Switzerland to run the OpenBSD booth for the event. LinuxDays has become a regular Open Source conference here in Geneva. It is mainly Linux-oriented but also focuses on the open source world at large in different areas: telecommunications, government, education, industry.

Julien continues below.

This is not a full hacker or techie meeting. At the event, we meet people that range from those that come to discover open source to techie people looking for solutions for their companies to scientists on some research areas.

The booths are divided into two sides: one for commercial companies involved or providing open source services, and one being the village for the associations.

Running the booth was quite interesting. I could meet several different people. The booth opposite mine was the Swiss Debian association. We had some discussion about the OpenSSL bug in the Debian package and about the recent historic BSD bug that Marc Balmer (mbalmer@) found. Sun Microsystems was there and I had to correct some of their people who were telling that we already had included ZFS within our source tree.

In a previous EuroBSDcon, we had discussed the silence of *BSD users when telling what system they run in their companies because they aren't running *BSD. However, I met several people telling me that they are using OpenBSD for their servers in their network.

As a long time user, preparing to stop being lazy and seriously wishing to contribute more in programming, I also gave a presentation about OpenBSD and failover/loadbalancing techniques. Slides are available in French. All talks are usually in French.

I must say that being at Linux events and explaining to people what we do and our philosophy was quite good. Many people were interested and found simplicity, clarity, and coherence of the overall system very attractive for their needs.

OpenBSD has already been welcomed for next year's LinuxDays and I will try to be there again giving a talk and providing some network workshops as several people were asking for.

Thank you to Julien for sharing his LinuxDays experience.