Chemnitzer Linuxtage - Misunderstandings, compulsory routers, and new black NoCloud t-shirts

Last weekend I was at the Chemnitzer Linuxtage giving a speech and talking with people at the FSFE booth. It was again a well organised event, I got encouraging feedback about my speech, and had interesting talks at the booth.

On Friday I met with Max Mehl in Leipzig and continued to travel to Chemnitz. The hotel owner already knew that there is an event about software at the university. During the check-in he asked us not to break his wifi. When we came back to the hotel, after setting up the FSFE booth at the university the owner again reminded us that his wifi is "a delicate plantlet" (in German "ein zartes Pflänzchen").

My talk about "Clearing up Free Software misunderstandings" was the first in the morning at 9am (German audio in Ogg vorbis). Despite the early time the room was almost full and we had a good discussion after the talk as well as several longer follow-ups at the FSFE booth. People liked the way how I solved the misunderstandings, and the feedback I received encouraged me in my plan to write short articles about the misunderstandings. So you should read more about this talk in the coming weeks.

A lot of the speakers and people from other booth teams are long time sustaining members of FSFE. I spent a lot of time to catch up with them and other dedicated Free Software contributors, to discuss current topics with them, and to hear what they are currently up to.

While I was catching up with people, Katja, Max, and Reinhard handled lots of questions at the booth, as well as making sure that people can get our t-shirts. Especially our NoCloud t-shirts were quite popular, including the new black version.

In the afternoon Max gave a talk about FSFE's work on compulsory routers and what you can learn from it (German audio in Ogg vorbis) will link to the video as soon as the video is online). Afterwards people offered us their support with technical expertise in the future about router technology, especially DSL and Cable technologies. This will be important for the second half of the year, when the internet service providers have to comply with the new law.

At the booth Max also had to answer lots of questions about the EU radio directive. If you know people with knowledge in the radio field, please ask them to give us feedback for our summary.

Beside that it was good to see that there was a workshop for flashing Libreboot as well as an F-Droid workshop. If you want to help promoting F-Droid, feel free to order our F-Droid leaflets.

Thanks to Katja, Reinhard, Max, and Fabian for making our booth a success, to Rico and Peer for helping with the transportation, and a big thanks to the organisers, who did an amazing job organising a great event to educate people about software freedom.

PS: The wifi of the hotel still worked when we checked out.