OpenBSD Journal

OpenCON 2006 impressions

Contributed by dhartmei on from the conferences dept.

OpenCON 2006 just ended on Sunday night, and this slightly exhausted but satisfied attendee just got home.

The third year it was held, this time the conference was entirely dedicated to OpenBSD, with sound success.

About 120 users and developers, including our fearless leader Theo, travelled to Venice from all over the world, including origins as far from Italy as Australia, Canada, the USA, and even Beirut.

The location was a comfortable hotel near the airport a quarter of an hour outside of Venice. There was a single track of 13 talks, covering various technical an social topics over the course of two days.

The presentations were well visited, and the conference room got pretty crowded at times, but everyone found a seat.

For me, the highlights were David Gwynne's interactive talk about the OpenBSD culture, and Theo's surprise talk, during which he summarized the results of the preceeding hardware hackathon in Portugal and the efforts to obtain documentation from hardware vendors.

Wim manned the merchandise booth, where both the usual and a couple of unique (or at least limited-edition) items were for sale. O'Reilly had a booth with a choice of books, I found an edition of their MAKE magazine well worth reading.

On Friday evening, the Italian hosts and their local helpers drove us to a very interesting local bar, where we were treated with free pasta, beer, and "Spritz" (a local drink specialty, made with Campari and white wine). Interesting because the place had a noticably political flair to it. I guess one could say that, under the eyes of chairman Mao, the members of the increasingly capable nation-state enjoyed the hospitality of their anti-imperialistic brethren in Venice.

Saturday night was the official "10 years of OpenBSD releases on CD" party. Alessio, in costume and impressive black hat, lead the crowd to the bus which took us downtown.

Not every restaurant can easily fit more than a hundred people, but the pizza place we were going to was huge, and the pizza delicious.

For dessert, Theo cut a large birthday cake which had the form of Puffy, the mascot blowfish.

I'd like to thank our Italian hosts for their good work, and hope they recover from exhaustion and will organize the event next year, too. This conference is quite unique in how it brings together users and developers, I met a lot of new people, and enjoyed it. Highly recommended.

Thanks to Peter N. M. Hansteen and Marcus Glocker for permission to use their pictures here. If you made pictures you'd like to share, please add a comment with the URL!

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. Comments
    1. By Marcus Glocker (81.221.21.253) mglocker@openbsd.org on http://www.nazgul.ch/

      > Please post links to your own images here, thank you!
      >
      

      All right, here just the raw, complete set of what I took.

      OpenCON 2006 Pictures

      It was fun to meet all the people. Thanks for this nice event!

      Cheers,
      Marcus

    2. By Anonymous Coward (71.227.122.204) on

      > Please post links to your own images here, thank you!
      >

      I noticed JCS posted his pictures from OpenCON. I hope he doesn't mind me submiting the link. Check em out: http://jcs.org/media/events/2006-12-01_opencon/

  2. By Anonymous Coward (195.29.157.74) on

    What a great event!

    Hope there will be presentations slides available.

  3. By Anonymous Coward (131.130.1.135) on

    sounds like fun. i think itīs interesting that people who mainly work together on a problem(?) also can have a great time together, just hanging around, having fun (I don't mean you were just "hanging around"!)
    thanks also for the pictures.

    I wonder whether it's a good omen if Theo cuts a blowfish in half ;)

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (213.189.137.178) on

      > sounds like fun. i think itīs interesting that people who mainly work together on a problem(?) also can have a great time together, just hanging around, having fun (I don't mean you were just "hanging around"!)
      > thanks also for the pictures.
      >
      > I wonder whether it's a good omen if Theo cuts a blowfish in half ;)

      Theo shares the blowfish and that is a good omen.

    2. By Anonymous Coward (24.84.108.103) on

      > I wonder whether it's a good omen if Theo cuts a blowfish in half ;)

      More importantly, when will the recipe be checked into CVS?

    3. By Anonymous Coward (62.252.32.12) on

      > I wonder whether it's a good omen if Theo cuts a blowfish in half ;)

      I hope that he's a skilled enough chef to do that .. the last thing you want is to end up with the poisonous bits!

  4. By toxa (213.170.76.150) on

    Wow, it's cool to see:

    theo# export CVSROOT=head@theo:/mouth cvs commit blowfish_cake

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