Sessions at FOSDEM 2011 about Open Source on Sunday 6th February

After a brief presentation of configuration management (CM) basics, we'll start with an ill-fated tale from the recent past about disaster recovery (also known as a case study, if you must): how our CM saved us, how it didn't, and what could have been done better. This could lead to a discussion about best practices around beers after the session.

We use Cfengine 3, and will introduce the software, overview the main differences with other open source CM tools before explaining why we like this choice. But Cfengine is not all: what enables us to manage our configuration completely are the practices and tools we've built around it. We will describe these in detail, probably offering a live demo (if Murphy permits).

LibreOffice is the most powerful and viable Free Softare office suite, available cross-platform. As well as a few demos showing its joys, we'll understand the history, and rational behind the LibreOffice project and its relation to OpenOffice.org.

We will survey the threat to the Free Software ecosystem that poorly managed, corporate dominated, copyright assignment based projects can cause. Then we'll get stuck into new features, our development roadmap, and how to get involved develping with it - even if you are not (yet) a super-star hacker. Come and get involved with something exciting, and help make tens of millions of user's first experience of Free Software something to be proud of.