This year, as almost all years since 2015 (or maybe 2014, not sure), - except those where the event went online due to COVID19 -, I attended FOSDEM. Contrary to the first two or three years, I now usually meet with people, try to get things to move on, socialize, and not really attend the talks anymore on-site, rather viewing the recorded video later.
Here is a small summary of this year’s attending from my perspective.
Coming to FOSDEM when one lives in Brittany
For the first year, I do not live near Paris anymore, but in Brittany, in Lorient’s area. For the first year, too, I finally have my driving license. I considered first taking the train, but having some friends with whom I intended to go from Paris by car, I decided to use mine and to drive from Lorient to Paris, and take the opportunity to do some random spot visit (and also to stay a bit on touch with highway driving).
The farmers’ protest
For those having missed it, French farmers have been protesting due to income issues for around three weeks (it ended mostly on Friday). Due to French government not paying attention enough, they decided last week to block most highways, and all those leading to Paris. It kind of broke my plans. I was a bit short to change the way we were going to FOSDEM and I could not really expect to visit random spots. I therefore enjoyed having to go around blockade spots, and taking 3 more hours than expected to do the 500 kms ride I had to do on Thursday.
Anyway, Friday’s ride was mostly normal, and I arrived at Brussels at 5pm, ready to not attend the non-official beer event (there is no official beer event since 2023, due to COVID adaptations FOSDEM had to implement), not being a fan of beers and very noisy and overcrowded bars.
Handling the Debian booth
As usual, FOSDEM means Debian swag being sold out to people. As Debian France’s treasurer (and even before), I therefore stand at the Debian booth a big part of the time to handle the selling of the merch, and to answer to people’s questions about Debian.
I also take the opportunity to meet other Developers, and this year we used the booth to have some meetup with all of the present members of Debian France’s board.
Sadly this year, due to the same protest, we were not able to have the Hoodies/Zippers delivered on time. I’d like to express here that we’re really sorry for this and we will have them available through En Vente Libre and next year at FOSDEM (and potentially before in French events).
Swag’s selling at FOSDEM
A big part of the load at Debian’s booth is selling the Debian-labelized merch.
How Debian Merch is handled at Debian’s booth.
Debian has a reasonably open policy on who can create merch with its logo and name, despite both being subject to trademarks protections. As a TO (see also TO Criteria), Debian France is allowed by the DPL to handle Debian’s assets, and also to use its trademark.
We therefore buy goodies on our own budget and sell them with a 5 to 20% margin (we apply a 10% margin and then round the prices to make cash inflow easy to handle, as for an example, we pay the hoodies 34.14 euros each, and therefore sell them 40 euros). Some goodies are not sold but offered to people (this year we offered lanyards, bottle openers, webcam privacy caps and stickers). The benefits are then added to Debian France’s budget. When this budget becomes high enough, we give a chunk of it to the project.
In 2023 we gave Debian 25 000 euros and paid 1 500 USD for the Debian Members’ LWN subscription slots, which corresponds to the excess we made for selling stuff from 2019 (it would have been more if COVID had not prevented several events to occur).
FOSDEM 2024 merch sales
With other members of Debian France’s board and one Debian Developer, we handled the booth and sold the merch. Thanks to our secretaries, we now have a SumUp terminal (and with the SumUp account also came “Tap to Pay”, which makes our smartphones able to handle contactless card payments too). This helped us to reduce greatly the cash inflow (handling a big amount of bills and coins is something we prefer to avoid), and also allowed those who prefer to work with cards to be able to buy merch efficiently.
Overall, we sold for about 9 700 euros of swag, which means about 1 300 euros benefits. From this we would have to deduce the price of the bottle openers et al, but I imagine we can consider Debian France earned about 1 000 euros.
Talking about Debian
During the week-end, we had a lot of people coming to just tell us how happy they are with Debian being how it is. To all of them we replied that we were happy they felt this way, and I want to take the opportunity of writing this post to emphasize it again: we really are glad that you enjoy using Debian or one of its derivatives.
We also got some interesting questions. I chose to write down two of them here:
The point of Debian compared to its derivatives
One person asked us why would someone use Debian instead of one of its derivatives nowadays. Surely, Ubuntu is more user friendly, Kali is better for a cybersec engineer, Tails would fit the expections of any person concerned with their privacy or a dissident. So why on earth would people use Debian in 2024?
I think there is no trivial answer. I would say there are multiple reasons which might push one to use Debian on their personal infrastructure:
- Their employer set their production under Debian for the servers;
- They started with Debian;
- They want a stable distro (which is one of the main qualities of Debian);
- Their hoster provide Debian and not their other favourite distro;
- The derivatives’ orientation does not fit their expectations;
- [something I did not think about]
Personally I use Debian because I am a Debian Developer and I think, of all the distros I tried, it is one of the best in terms of being a Swiss Knife, having options of all sorts for all activities I want to run. Surely, it has drawbacks, being one of the oldest, its packaging system is quite complex (but also very potent), it is slow-paced (so not all cutting-edge tools are there), it has some rigidities (but it’s mostly why it’s so stable).
Another strong reason for me to use Debian is that it’s one of the distributions with a strong community, it’s not driven by any company, even indirectly (it shares that with other distros, though), and the people there are in general quite nice.
Can I attend DebConf while not being a Debian Developer?
A person came by and asked if they could consider coming at DebConf in South Korea. They wanted to contribute to Proxmox, after having contributed to Debian in the past but not recently.
I think it’s worth to restate here that anyone should feel welcome to come at DebConf as long as they remember that it’s very Debian centric and therefore most talks will be about Debian, as a technical project, or as a community.
In general, DebConf are good ways to start contributing to the project, as developers there are available to interact more strongly.
Debian France’s board meetup
Debian France had some troubles in the past years to initiate new projects, and mostly went on with daily stuff. We took the opportunity to discuss with the present board members about some projects we could initiate.
Mini DebConf @ Toulouse
The end of the year means, in France, that the Capitole du Libre happens. There has been an idea to organize a Mini DebConf in the same time span. This would make the whole logistics easier. We do expect to be able to give more intel if it can happen in the next two months.
Board physical meetup
For the past 5 years we tried to have the board meet during a week-end to plan stuff, once per year. COVID prevented us to do that, and since the end of the restrictions, inertia did the same. We agreed that we should organize a physical meetup during April, just after the General Assembly.
General Assembly
Due to upgrades in our infrastructure in the end of 2022, we had troubles with our Mailman setup. Having multiple big life changes, I was not able to look into it before summer. While I was able to fix the issues we had, we didn’t organize the 2023 General Assembly, and decided in November to merge it with the next one. We would like to extend our apologies to our members for keeping them in the dark.
The Secretaries will reach out soon regarding the General Assembly, which will occur during March.
Accounting
I took the opportunity of being at FOSDEM to finish the accounting ledger for 2023 and for January. I gave insights on the process to Jean-Pierre, my co-treasurer. It’s a tedious job, but it’s really great to be able to have a track on how Debian France and Debian assets are doing over the years.
That’s all folks
See you next year at Debian’s booth!