Waffles against technology at FOSDEM 2016

I learned about the FOSDEM conference around November, when an offer came to the OpenStreetMap mailing list to announce reports to the Geospatial stream. I sent a request for mobile map editors (including MAPS.ME soon), it was confirmed in December, and Mail.Ru Group sent me on a business trip. Since this is my first time, I found “a mask at a construction site” in the topic of open source, and I don’t know anyone, instead of fruitful communication with acquaintances, which takes about half the time at the Osmer conferences of State of the Map, wrote notes in order to put it into this text . There are many words and photos under the cut.

I arrived on Thursday morning, mostly to have time to prepare a report. In MAPS.ME, all of January is an emergency; we are writing three grandiose features at the same time, which is why we didn’t make it at home. But in the hotel, especially after midnight, the work goes on.


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Brussels public transport. By taxi from the airport to go half an hour and 50 euros. But you can go down to the buses and drive for 4.50. Or to the 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 need to travel by tram or bus. In the city, ordinary tickets for one hour cost 2.50 at the driver or 2.10 at the machines in the subway. Specially on Friday night I ran 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 the hotel to the university by transport (tram + bus) is only 15 minutes. The pub Delirium, where the social event took place, is about the same. Brussels is a small city by Moscow standards. Some participants who settled at the other end of the city walked to FOSDEM.



In the morning I walked around the district, took pictures of beautiful houses. The weather was settling all days: it was constantly raining, sometimes the wind was rising. I do not know why, but I expected the sun and heat. He drew attention to the establishments on the first floors. It seems that on the crowded streets the first floors are never residential: in every house there is a shop, or a studio, or a restaurant, or realtors. The houses are narrow, and there are many of them, and the same ones are rarely found. Everywhere building, somewhere rails shift, somewhere plaster walls. After a long choice of places for lunch, I run into kebabs: large portions and simple code. When it came out, 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. The Belgian beer is excellent, although it is rather strong: the two half-pint was enough for the unusual. Beer was issued for tokens that were sold at the entrance for 4 euros. Very convenient, no need to throw money through the rack. 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 there were. Two floors, taken under the event, were crowded, an alley on the street, too. How did I manage to come across the only acquaintance at this conference? I gave him business cards, which I printed a little earlier with my friends. It was enough that I constantly forget them. However, in three days I gave only one, out of a hundred printed. It was necessary to take MAPS.ME stickers, they are cool and always fly away in a moment.



Brussels is a French speaking city, but it was in all languages. I rarely heard Russians, but several times, having started a conversation in English, I found out that the interlocutor had come from Russia. We stand, discuss the hardware alternative to Dropbox without a monthly subscription, a third person leaves, and the interlocutor is like this: “By the way, I’m Dmitry, you can speak Russian.” Or, on Saturday at breakfast in a hotel, Yuri somehow defined Russian in me, but we decided to continue in English, because it is a bit strange in a European country to communicate in Russian.

Interestingly, some Russians in Europe seem disappointed, complain that everything is bad and only gets worse, and they are thinking of returning to Russia. Well, well, we have everything perfectly.

Saturday

Opening and closing reports are simple: hello, thanks to the people on the list, and here's an interesting statistic. 52 streams, 568 speakers, 310 hours of video recordings. Suddenly I discovered that the gear with the eyes that were stamped on the hand at the entrance to the Delirium is the conference logo.



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 rushes between the audiences and only small breaks in the afternoon. They sell FOSDEM T-shirts for 25 euros (this year is black, but expensive, everyone else is selling T-shirts for 15), a lot of interesting books from O'Reilly, but on Amazon they will obviously be cheaper.

Lennart talks about everything. Systemd is for everyone except Gentoo (and adherents of Gent boast about it). I expected to see a lot of unusual presentation systems (and not PowerPoint + LibreOffice, as at other conferences), but the system with small text on a white background baffled. The neighbor suggested that this is Beamer , a module for LaTeX. Lennart talked about systemd, nspawn, sd-dhcp. Now he is working on the Unified Control Group Hierarchy: “Docker is not compatible”. I listened for 20 minutes and when he began to move on to really interesting things, such as DNSSEC , he escaped to Python.



The room is predictably crammed. Another five minutes - and hang the sign "lol, good try, but look better online." Raising of hands: it turned out, almost everyone started with the C language, and very few people from Pascal or BASIC. 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. The presentation system just go nuts! Just highlighted code, you press the button - it is executed, you press again - the next slide with the code.

I learned about zip (), which merges two arrays into tuples, and with dict () turns them, obviously, into dict. The default parameters of the function are initialized only once, so if you make arg = [], you can grow and grow an array inside the function. A simple except word 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 foundations of python, but even I did not know any little things.

Yuri Numerov was lost, but the good news is that another 11:01. They found a speaker at the lightning talk, and now he came running and ran away, 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 an employee of Vaadin on JavaOne. No, in the slides. And because of the delay of ten minutes very quickly and figs read. Uses only system libraries, but where does DO ('clear') come from? There is not even a check for the completion of 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 replica of the speed, independent of the speed of the computer, - God, it is now 2000, or what? Made an eternal loop with time.time () checking. This time it calls os.system ('clear'). Okay, and now he just plays his tetris on stage. Understand the good thing about two-dimensional navigation in reveal.js: if you are late in time, you can quickly jump to the next topic without finishing the current one.

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



Exit the body U straight for a snack. And there, of course, Belgian waffles! Pass past the Belgian waffles forgivable only in one case: if you already have a waffle in your hand. In short, he was late for the VLC report , there he was full. In the next room, with lawyers, some not very interesting topic about the license of dependent packages. I sit in an empty room from under the lightning talks, I see on Twitter that the Mozillovists are handing out cookies . In half an hour I fly to them!



I barely made my way into the license room. Broadcasts Dave Neary , not a lawyer. In front of me sits a tall man. Pancake. Dave is far away and without a microphone. Raising hands: there are about ten lawyers in the room. The story about changing the license from BSD 2c to Apache: 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 the patent is a legal risk, so lawyers are not advised to read them. Important link: fossmarks.org , there is a focus on the model trademark guidelines .

Since there was a hole in my schedule, I read what would happen next, and stayed on to research the software distribution operation: when do the GPL conditions turn on? Swedish schools require children of 9–12 years 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 the restriction of distribution rights.



100% of respondents said that it was always obvious whether it was a fact of distribution or not, but in specific cases half said it was, half said it wasn’t. Important slides: "Spectrum (2/3)" and "Related Questions". The main problem is when the user does not own the equipment or the program is stitched in the car. If they gave open software to the computer for an hour, did they spread it? GPL v2 uses the term distribution, in GPL v3 it was replaced with 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 court practice: a set-top box, when rent was not considered a transfer of software, and a case when advertising software with parts of a code under the GPL was considered distribution. 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 necessary to proceed from the fact that in doubtful cases we consider everything to be a distribution.

In front of me sits a man with awesome. I recognize this interface always, spent with him almost a year.



I didn’t manage to look at the recordings because of the long legal report on the story about homebrew (the translation does not work in some places). Tried to get food, but quickly give out only waffles. Again. In other trailers queue people in 40-50. Plus, unpleasant rain with the wind, because of which I don’t want to leave the H building at all. I will try to stay on the waffles for a couple of hours and get normal food with meat afterwards.

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



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

For many listeners on Telegram screens, there is IRC, and certainly in the console via irssi. Only once saw the web interface of whatsapp.



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



I decided to go for a half-hour story about the profitability of the PyPy project. The patron corporation did not want to (they are not in the city where the author lives), they received a European Union grant of one million euros for R & D, but had to fill out a bunch of pieces of paper. Crowd funding gave 150 thousand. Consulting helps financially, but creates strange restrictions on the application: you need to work, but not too well, to demand 10 thousand for consulting. But it is easy to sell, showing a monetary benefit 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 benefits from reconstruction. Perhaps for this you have to dig a couple of holes yourself.



What is at the conference with food? There was no dedicated cafe or catering, as they often do, because there are thousands of people. For the most part, everything was purchased in mobile kiosks on the main avenue. There were Belgian waffles, more waffles on a stick, some vegan grass, sandwiches and french fries. I bought the last one, and it was the worst decision on this trip. Not only is it expensive, it’s also uncomfortable to eat, not enough meat, and it’s all doused with oil. Ugh, tomorrow only waffles and sandwiches. Next 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 were said to be tastier than the street ones.



After seeing the fifteen-minute window in the sessions of Birds of Feather, he wrote there the “meeting of the OpenStreetMap community”. Just see how many osmer here. In general, besides me, only one person appeared, turned out to be a Russian from Sweden. We talked about his android application for collecting data on altitude and other attributes of houses. There were also two members of the OSM ( HOT ) humanitarian team with whom I am unfamiliar (and who do not know about OSMF). They were sitting at the HOT booth, but it’s unclear why: there’s nothing to sell to the team. Tomorrow, Blake Girardot, vice president of the organization, will give a closing plenary report on their activities.



Reagan MacDonald talks about the protection against tracking in Firefox. Tracking really all. There are tracking companies, there is to collect all the information (RapLeaf, Acxiom). Business is tens of billions of dollars, so companies cannot work to protect against tracking. Plus, governments also want to know everything (see the revelations of Snowden).

Entered a guy talking about technology. Cookies, especially 3party. It is easy to disable, but there is fingerprinting: we consider uniqueness in the set of system and browser properties. Lightbeam plugin shows who can track. In Europe, once obliged 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”. Participants saw him on the site of the Friday Delirium pub because of the Malvari. Mozilla decided to do the same for trackers. 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 have time for a story about how organizations are trying to monetize the open source, and this is killing the community. But there was a full house, and they didn’t let me back because of the full house, so I spat and went to the bus home.

At nine o'clock in the evening. You need to reduce your report, draw slides and read aloud at least twice (or better, seven, but it is also important to sleep). And do not write this report, as you can already.

Sunday

Came out late and decided to walk to the university. Only half an hour, twice as long as going by tram. The weather is still bad, rain is dripping, but not the same as in Petersburg. I went down to the market on Flage Square, there is only food and socks. I still can not find sneakers, so as not to walk around the hotel in shoes. In the evening I found that there was a comic book store on 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 they showed hardware pieces (sorry, not very interested), and on the second floor there was a Geospatial stream.



Report on location and maps in Gnome. The Geoclue2 library (it is a pity 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. ModemManager service determines the position of 3G with an accuracy of a couple of kilometers (better and 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. The libchamplain library is for drawing OSM. Directly from the card, you can check in at 4sq / fb / twi. To build routes using Graphhopper, there is a pedestrian and bicycle. Satellite substrate in general, no, obviously not Bing and Mapbox. The alpha version is already able to open GeoJSON files.



Now about the results of GSoC 2015 in OSGeo. The organization was founded in 2006 by the main developers of the geo-philosopher. The report is a banal listing of the projects of this year, who did what. Mostly screenshots. There are many girls among the students. All 15 students coped with the tasks - unprecedentedly, before there were 1-3 failures. The two girls spoke alternately, partly resembled an award ceremony, but did not award anyone, of course, ended up with nothing.



Tuukka from the Helsinki administration is working on public transport routes on the map (OSM is an important part). The current system, called HSL Journey Planner , counts the route from stop to stop, 100,000 users per day. The peculiarity of Finland is its low population density. Make a new route planner with a 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 a routing for pedestrians and bicycles, route directions, etc. A very cool feature is the route guidance. It can be seen which stop you are approaching. True, the location is still calculated according to the schedule, there is no GPS on the buses. At the heart of GTFS, they invented their own transport location query scheme and GraphQL for their route information. All on githaba . The project has six developers and a designer from the outside, one programmer at the rate and one architect. 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.

I was next, told about the map editor in MAPS.ME, and I don’t really like it when they only tell about the software, so I connected the phone to Mac and broadcast its screen, showing everything with examples. There is no microphone in ordinary halls, only in large ones, therefore, probably, people did not hear half of what I said. But laughed at the right slides - and then the bread. I prostupil: after the report, you need to go out of the audience and half a hour to communicate with anyone who has questions. At such a large conference, people quickly disappear.



I decided to rest and stayed on the Flight Simulator report. The OpenStreetMap map is used as a texture, and the runway geometry is also pulled out. 3D houses, roofs, models STL. The simulator works in a browser via WebGL (three.js). Clouds and fog. Flight mechanics through JBSim, supports joysticks. Alas, the project is far from finished, there is no demo: the author deals with it in his free time. He told about the simulator and did not show a single picture - all for nothing.

Now about the plugin for 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 on the surface of the relief, the texture of the raster layers. In order not to render all the points at once, the author added a fog: at the same time, you can render lower quality tiles. He tries to keep up with the development of OL3 and Cesium, thinks about the client reprojection of the vector and raster (in Europe, the web merchant is not common in our country, everyone is sitting on their convenient projections). They asked from the audience how to make a layer of meshes from SRTM, which is used for relief. It turned out that there are still no open tools for this.



I hurried to Brian's “redbeard” lecture about CoreOS, which I was advised earlier, but, although I had time, I didn’t fit into the hall: they missed the third queue, then hung up the “busy” sign. Well, okay, I went to lunch. This time he was taught and took a chicken sandwich. Then he called home - how cool is that there is VoIP, you can chat for a long time and for free. And it was just time to choose the next lecture.

It was very difficult to choose between the OpenDocument format and the lecture about DCO , the replacement with the classic CLA, but in the end I decided that I would be less likely to learn about the first from other sources. "ODF means power". Since 2017, the Dutch government wants to translate all correspondence with the population into a figure. And then it takes about ten minutes to fill up how hard it is for the government to switch to open formats and that the MS Office formats in the workflow are several times larger. I was hoping for a technical lecture.



The Document Liberation Project initiative is trying to pull data from obsolete formats into ODF (i.e., makes converters). A brief description of the format, version history (only three, the last - 1.2, added EDS). The format committee looks at user reviews, bug tracker, etc. The problem with large software developers is that they don’t want standardization, because these are costs and there are fewer reasons for users to stay with competitors. Applications must handle ODF carefully so as not to break XML. Sometimes Plugfest is collected (events in Western Europe), where developers verify that everyone works the same way with ODF. , Calligra ( ). LibreOffice. — Acid, . caniuse.com , , . , .



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• Jelle Haandrikman , .
• Jeremy Bennett .
• Radek Pazdera .
• Shane Kerr DNS.
• Anjana Sofia Vakil , .
• Johan Van de Wauw Geospatial , .
• Siderite Zackwehdex .
• ReactOS ( , ).
• Mark Keating Perl .
• Brian Proffitt Linux Expo , .
• Vasil Kolev worked in a video recording team , shares schemes.
• Peter Van Eynde from Cisco shares traffic statistics .
• Twitter feed on the hashtag #fosdem : a lot of photos and delights.
• Fifty interviews on Hacker Public Radio: one , two , three , four .

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