For immediate release
FOSDEM 2009: Linux, Mozilla, MySQL and more 
9th Brussels Free and Open Source Developer Meeting on Feb. 7-8, 2009
Brussels, Jan. 6, 2009 - On February 7 and 8, over five thousand Free and Open Source developers gather at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, campus Solbosch, for the ninth annual FOSDEM conference. Keynote speakers this year include Mark Surman (executive director of the Mozilla Foundation), Bdale Garbee (Debian project secretary), and Leslie Hawthorn (Google Summer of Code).

An impressive main track has been assembled. Amongst the 20 speakers are Theodore Ts'o (Linux kernel, ext4 file system), Max Spevack (Fedora project) and Rob Savoye (Gnash, the free Flash player). Savoye: "Free software is well accepted these days as good business sense, and not just a bunch of crazy people. A long time ago if you worked on free software, people thought you were a homeless bum. These days, you're just as likely to discover all sorts of people run free software for all sorts of tasks, and it's nice to see we've had a positive impact on the world over the last 20 years."

In parallell to the main track, 30 lightning talks are planned: short 15 minute presentations on subjects as diverse as MuseScore music notation, GnuTLS security library, TikiWiki wiki, Bazaar version control, and more.

One of the things that make FOSDEM unique are the developer rooms. These are rooms in which selected projects can organize their own schedule: presentations, brainstorming and coding sessions. With cross-pollination between projects one of FOSDEM's main goals, the KDE, Gnome and XFCE desktop projects share a developer room on Sunday. Other developer rooms include, amongst others, Fedora + CentOS, embedded, Drupal, X.org, and Ruby on Rails.

Between main tracks, dev rooms and lightning talks and during breaks, visitors will find plenty of room for distraction at the many booths lining the halls: eight Linux and BSD distributions, an O'Reilly bookshop with discounts, FSF Europe, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, and more.

And finally, keeping up a good tradition, FOSDEM is and stays free. No fees nor registration needed.

For more information, please refer to http://fosdem.org .
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About FOSDEM: 

FOSDEM is an annual free and non-commercial event for Free Software and Open Source developers, by the community for the community. We provide Free Software and Open Source developers and communities with a place to get in touch with other developers and projects; keep visitors up to date on the latest developments in the Free Software and Open Source world; offer a platform for talks and presentations to Free Software and Open Source project leaders and committers; and promote the development and the benefits of Free Software and Open Source solutions. FOSDEM Participation and attendance is free, though the organization gratefully accepts donations and sponsorship. 

Press contact:

Mark Van den Borre, +32 486 961726, mvandenborre@fosdem.org (NL, EN)
Elise Huard, +32 486 511450, ehuard@fosdem.org (FR, NL, EN)