On ke, 08 tammi 2020, Joost van Baal-Ilić wrote:
Hi again,
On Wed, Jan 08, 2020 at 10:56:16AM +0000, Richard Ibbotson wrote:
I sill remember the t-shirt. I could wear my original SuSE not openSUSE t-shirt. But.. don't want to upset the Debian people :) At about 2000/2001 we were thinking that Fosdem was going to fail. Not enough people. Looks like we were wrong. Nice to see that the conference that I started back in 1994 as OSDEM
1994!? I understood there has been only one OSDEM-event, in 2000 or 2001. I read at https://archive.fosdem.org/2002/about/1200.html from sept 2001: "The first event was called OSDEM. The next edition will be called FOSDEM" which seems to support that.
No. We started about 1995. I was there the year before. I got it going after some people at the university for an "Oopen source conference" In a heavy English/Belgian accent. The only way I could pull in a crowd in was to ask RMS to join in. Which he did.
So, there was a OSDEM-meeting in Brussels in 1995 where RMS participated? Wow...
Do you have a link to stuff from the late nineties?
For some reason most of it or all of it has vanished. Apart from my own SuSE t-shirts. Which were always controversial due to the fact that some developers didn't like them. Never mind.
Hrm, I learned Peter 'p2' De Schrijver gave a talk at OSDEM 2001. He just told me he is not aware of any OSDEM-meetings in Brussels _before_ the 2001 meeting. And http://dag.wiee.rs/events/ lists 1997 events, but not any pre-2001 OSDEM...
BTW, I've found http://fosdem.3ti.be/osdem-2001-index.php : pics from OSDEM 2001 ; and there's http://plaatjes.mdcc.cx/2002/200202-brussels-fosdem/me_preparing_talk.jpg :)
Still very much interested in some confirmation about these pre-2001 meetings.
I gave a talk and led a workshop at OSDEM 2001. At the time, organizers were saying it is their first international event but that they had some events before at the university. -- / Alexander Bokovoy