BSDCan 2008 officially started this morning at 9AM with an opening talk by the event's organizer, Dan Langille. However, in reality the event has already been running for two days, with the FreeBSD tutorials having started on the 14'th. After arriving in Ottawa yesterday afternoon and finding my room in a 20 story University of Ottawa residence, I wandered down to the Royal Oak Pub for early registration, meeting several dozen BSD hackers from all over the world.
This morning's opening talk was well attended, filling up first with clusters of laptop users around the power outlets along both walls. By 15 minutes after the hour, the room was completely full, and Dan started with a humorous slideshow of example letters he's been receiving ever since posting the words "letter of invitation" somewhere on the BSDCan website two year back. Coming primarily from Nigeria, the letter's authors often claim to represent large groups of developers, yet always coming from "disposable" email addresses. After some laughs, he launched into his opening keynote.
Statistics
With over 200 people in the room, Dan asked how many have attended all five BSDCans, with one or two dozen raising their hands. Easily twice as many raised their hands when asked for how many this is their fourth BSDCan, and twice that again attending for their third time. Most of room indicated that this is at least their second BSDCan. Dan then changed tacts, asking how many virgins were in the room, with several dozen of us raising our hands. This was followed with the question, "and how many people are attending BSDCan for the first time," met with a momentary silence, and then laughter.
Later during the keynote, it was determined that about 20 attendees are from Ottawa or the surrounding area, and were able to drive to the event. 5 came from the southern hemisphere, and 2 or 3 came from Asia. That leaves the rest of the 220 attendees coming from North America and Europe.
Sponsors
Dan went on to thank the many sponsors of BSDCan 2008, noting who was attending the talk from the various sponsors. He continued on discussing logistics such as lunch and social events after the two days of the conference.
Bounties
Next, Dan posted two bounties for people participating the conference. Anyone who can get Flash working on FreeBSD AMD64, or the 64-bit port of Opera by the closing session tomorrow will receive free admission to BSDCan for life, and $500.
Review
He went on to review what he's been doing the past year, mentioning that BSDCan is followed by PGCon the following weekend. He also noted that he's frequently asked what's involved in running a conference, to which this year he replied by setting up a conference blog which he summarized as "three weeks in the life of a conference organizer".
From there, Dan drew a parallel between BSD and the nearby Rideau Canal, a World Heritage Site located a few hundred yards away from the conference. He pointed out that many people don't know much about BSD, don't know the infrastructure involved in building it, or the quality of the work done, paralleling that to how few people at the conference new about the nearby World Heritage Site.
Following the closing session tomorrow, it was noted there will be an organized pgp key signing for people bringing photo ID's, pens, and key fingerprints.
The talk ended, and about two thirds of the room wandered off to attend other sessions in today's schedule. I'll post a summary of all the talks I attend at the end of the day.
