FISL stands for Forum Internacional do Software Livre, that is, the International Free Software Forum. It is a 4-day event held every year at Porto Alegre, a city in the southern part of Brazil which is known for its political activism – the first few editions of the World Social Forum (the social counterpoint to Davos’ World Economic Forum), for example, were hosted in the city, and its voters are typically the first ones to adopt opposition trends when the government of the day (regardless of its political orientation) fails to deliver.
From a physical standpoint, sponsors and goverment companies had some prominent booths (and provided a large share of the sponsorhip of the event), showing the interest of both enterpreneurs and Brazil’s federal administration on free and open source software (or, at least, their willingness to be associated with it, since it seems to be the digital version of “eco-friendly”, without the associated impact on the bottom line – a capitalist’s dream.)
Speaking of government, President Lula decided to make a “cameo” appearance at the event, showing up almost without notice on the third day. The positive side was that this brought attention to the event itself and to the government commitment to freedom – he was very incisive about nixing Senator Azeredo’s initiative towards mandatory surveilance systems on ISPs (not to mention making it illegal to copy almost anything from one digital media to another, all disguised in an attempt to combat pedophilia crimes on the internet.) However, this surprise appearance caused a stir during the last two days, making the booths inaccessible for most of the third day, and time/place-shifting a sizeable part of the presentations, confusing speakers and participants.
Sun Microsystems was not a surprise – besides having endured a long struggle until finally making Java open-source, this flagship-yet-unprofitable product is the cornerstone for a multitude of open-source products and platforms (not to mention that they were also the backers of the product which became OpenOffice). However, the recent acquisition of Sun by Oracle led to an Oracle stand also being present. We were a bit scared of asking Larry Ellison’s employees what their boss thinks of open-source software – but we didn’t have to, thanks to the talkative tendency of business moguls and some google-ing:
“If an open source product gets good enough, we’ll simply take it. [...] So the great thing about open source is nobody owns it – a company like Oracle is free to take it for nothing, include it in our products and charge for support, and that’s what we’ll do (…) We don’t have to fight open source, we have to exploit open source.” (source: Financial Times)
Besides the sponsors, there were a few free-software based businesses and some nonprofit organizations. Of these, Mozilla really stood out: not only did they display some amazing animations (produced by Firefox users to promote the browser – air time is being purchased on old-school TV to air them), they were also actively promoting the collaboration of people on the enhancement of their main product (Firefox), in particular development of plug-ins for the browser. Demo sessions on the subject and prizes for plug-in development made the stand really popular (Sun had to distribute hundreds of small soccer-like-balls to compete.)
Finally, there were the user groups. Not nearly as shiny as the other booths, they tried to compensate that by assertiveness – you could enter any booth and get your shot of evangelization on whichever topic the group discussed. Software exchanges were commons, with Linux distribution CDs being offered everywhere.
A complete list of the sponsors and organizations can be found on the map, and a list of the user groups is found here. Descriptions are Portuguese-only, unfortunately, but lots of familiar logos make it clear that most of the classic and trendy technologies attracted people. In fact, one of the most popular trivia games among the participants was trying to identify all the logos that composed the event logo – how many can you recognize on the picture below?
One important aspect of FISL is socialization – lots of people that collaborate online ended up gathering at the event. There is even space for some cross-polinization: in one night we were able to find an entire floor of a popular pasta restaurant in Porto Alegre filled with FISL tables: a company, a nonprofit and an academic group ended up all at the same place!
Above all that, one of the most sought-after aspects of the event were the speeches. FISL has a tradition of bringing the FLOSS hotshots: Richard Stallman and Jon “maddog” Hall are typical participants, but every year has a good lineup. This year’s popstar was Peter Sunde, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay, whose unfair trial has turned Sunde and the other co-founders into the poster children of the anti-copyright movement.
All popular technologies, social views and trends were addressed by the various speech tracks – of course, in an event with more than a dozen conference rooms spanning four days, even some non-popular ones were able to have their time slice. Judging individual speeches is mostly a matter of personal interest and taste (or lack thereof, such as the one titled “PHP is not stuff for kids” – the first slide somewhat summarizes how far they still have to go to prove that.)
It was interesting to see Google sharing its knowledge beyond the technical stuff: Chris DiBona gave a comprehensive exposition of how Google uses and shares open source software – any company that wishes to be relevant on the FLOSS-scenario (and not just try to look cool on the internet without much real contribution) should pay attention to it. And Leslie Hawthorn shared a bit on how she handles the (hard) job of nurturing open source communities – it is not that hard to create communities with the partygoers that gather to shoot pictures of their stuffed animals – Leslie talks about the complicated matter of reaching the non-social developers, both online and offline. This is the kind of stuff that shows why Google stands above the crowd, and will remain there in the foreseeable future.
However, on the social aspects of software development and use, it would be hard to beat Michael Tiemann’s (of Cygnus/RedHat fame) talk about the state of open source policies. Think of it as a Michael Moore meets Levitt/Dubner thing, but focused on the role of open source into the development of nations worldwide. Such talks make the experience of going to FISL much more comprehensive than going to more focused (as in “limited”) tech conferences, and anyone with a less closed/computer-ish mind should really consider attending FISL instead of the trend-du-jour technology meetings that computer nerds get so obsessed about.
