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Blogging live from Libre-Planet. Yet another very good breakfast at the Irving House. Home made bread and other bakeries, cheese from a local farm, and fair trade coffee.

If you've attended Bar Camp Montreal, you know that a wiki kind of "unconference" can go extremely smoothly and efficiently. Nothing like that in here. Lots of people running around, the schedule is somewhere on the wiki but no one knows quite where, people are jumping on the stage to ask the audience if they can do a lightning talk at the end of the day. Oh my. But still, it works. We are running three tracks in difference conference rooms: Free Software activism, Important Projects, and Web Services. There are smaller rooms where people can get together and work and there is a lot of coffee and snacks. Our plan right now is to skip some of the lightning talks so we have time to go to the Cambridge Brewery Company, which was vigorously recommended by many, including my manager.

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Blogging live from Libre Planet. Second part of day-one was quite busy. Here is briefly how it went. The supplied lunch was really good. There was some kind of bean salad and brochettes, both chicken and vegetarian ones.

The afternoon session started with a panel on Free Software activism with Brian Gough, Ryan Bagueros, and Bradley Kuhn. The panel somewhat lacked of focus which is bad considering the very interesting set of panelists that we had. The second presentation was really good. Evan Prodromou talked about his experience at offering Free Software web services. He had a very colored view of being free in all sense of the term: making the source only available under the AGPL license so that other service suppliers can't withhold their improvements; making the user data easy migrate and transport to a supplier; making the software easy to interoperate with by developing it's API as an open standard. Truely a moving and enlightening talk.

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Blogging live from Libre Planet. Here I am in attending Libre Planet in Cambridge with Pascal Charest. I will probably write a longer wrap-up later on but here is how it goes so far.

A very busy morning session starting with Jeremy Alison from the Samba project with a very nice presentation on what kind of strategy Microsoft is using to attack Free Software and how we can defend ourselves.

Benjamin Mako Hill did a presentation on the Affero GPL and how the definition of Free Software needs to be revised in a world where web-services makes it increasingly easier to let users work with your software without actually distributing it.

At this very moment, Alexandre Oliva is presenting Linux-Libre, a fork of the Linux kernel that is free from binary blobs and other non-free parts.

The laptop distribution in the audience is interesting in itself. I see at least height eight Thinkpads, as many EEE 1000 of various flavors, one EEE 700 that is impressively actively used, and at least 3 macs.

More to come.

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