Libre Software Meeting, Bordeaux 5-9.7.2000

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For four sunny days, about 250 developers and enthusiasts gathered at Bordeaux, France, to meet each other, share information, and advance free software. It was the first Libre Software Meeting, organized mainly by the Association Bordelaise des Utilisateurs de Linux (ABUL).

The event was somewhere between a conference and a meeting, contents divided into several topics. In each topic part of the time was reserved for talks and part of the time for discussions, work and making future plans. Many people of course had cross interests and moved from room to room to get as much out of it as possible. In addition to the developers' meeting, public presentations were given in a separate building, gathering another 250 people. This is a picture based travel story of my experience, one view to the event.

See also

Day one: Breathing the international atmosphere
The ENSERB building in the daytime The event took place at the ENSERB, on the campus of the Université Bordeaux I, France. I was working at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, so a train overnight was a comfortable transport choice. I arrived at the site at about 7.30 on Wednesday morning.
Student dormitory Our accommodation was in one of the student dormitories, just next to the main site. Some participants lived in hotels in the city, but most took advantage of this very reasonably priced offer. In addition, the organizers had got enough sponsor money to cover the travel and accommodation costs for speakers and some other attendants having material constraints.
Registration Germany, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Mexico, United States, Senegal, Australia... - it became immediately clear that the meeting was to be international. The total number of nationalities present was 31. The organizers were busy accepting registrations.
The opening session, Pierre Jarillon speaking Pierre Jarillon, the president of ABUL, said the first words in the main auditorium. Then Jacques Pistré, the assistant of the director of ENSERB and Jean-Pierre Dufour, the vice president of the Aquitaine region also welcomed us at Bordeaux and gave an advise to not use all the time in front of computers but also to take advantage of the possibilities of the city and its surroundings.
Francois Pellegrini, one of the main organizers Francois Pellegrini gave information of the practical details: the timetable, location of important facilities and organization of the rooms at the main site. Every topic had its own room reserved for internal meetings and group work.

After a short break the leader of every topic described shortly their program and goals for the conference. This was useful especially for people with several interests to get an overview what would be available. Of course many topics didn't have anything planned for the duration of the whole event, so smaller related ones were combined.

After lunch in the campus area restaurant I went first to see the Debian people: project leader Wichert Akkerman told about the current state of Debian project and the afternoon was reserved for questions, discussion, getting to know each other. However, I decided to sneak in to the very high level languages topic, where Robert Strandh told about his ideas of a multi-language multi-processor platform and about Free-CLIM, a free implementation of the Common Lisp interface manager (CLIM), a library that provides graphical user interface functionality for Lisp programmers.

A group picture The campus restaurant didn't have dinner available so most people headed downtown to get food. The group picture was taken on the place du Parlement.
Waiting for raclette The streeds surrounding the square were filled with dozens of nice looking restaurants serving French food, but our choice for this first evening was a Swiss specialty: the raclette. From the left: Daniel Lutz, Daniel Wagner, Christoph Lameter, me and Anthony Towns.
Another table Apparently some people were attached to their computers - I wonder what the laptop would like to eat. :) From the left: Joost van Baal, Wichert Akkerman, Russell Coker.
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Copyright Arto Teräs <ajt@iki.fi> 2000-2001.
Redistribution of this document as a whole or any of the pictures individually is permitted in any medium provided this copyright notice is preserved.

Last update 12.9.2002