Let's take a look at my annotated copy of the FOSDEM 2019 main talk schedule, shall we?
Keynotes
Welcome to FOSDEM 2019 The sign-in sheet for this session doubles as a census of people nobody wants to talk to.
Can Anyone Live in Full Software Freedom Today?
Confessions of Activists Who Try But Fail to Avoid Proprietary Software
Some bureaucrats make excuses for the conference attendees' hypocrisy. In place of productive information or actual technical content, the speakers will whine about which programs nobody's writing for free. The audience will take notes on Macbooks, iPads, and other Apple products.
FLOSS, the Internet and the Future
A primordial webshit travels to a conference devoted to serving a specific copyright cult, and then holds a lecture about why the copyright cult is really important. Nobody in the room will learn anything new, and the speaker will not reach any audience not already in the cult. While this is arguably a massive failure of advocacy, it's also about on par with copyright cultists' track record to date.Blockchain: The Ethical Considerations
Another bureaucrat speaks to a very specific confluence of misapprehensions, to wit:
- Any functioning human gives a shit about bitcoin,
- Bitcoin has any effect on human society at all,
- Anyone has found a valid use case for blockchain technology,
- Blockchain dunces are ever given any position of responsibility,
- Anyone cares about the ethical value judgments of a professional copyright cultist
Nobody attending the talk will have the heart to point any of this out.
The Cloud is Just Another Sun
The speaker is very angry that people are using computers in a manner that renders specific copyright licenses irrelevant. The audience will be instructed to care even harder, even though no solutions are available. The speaker works for a company whose profitability depends on a customer base who gives a shit about copyright licenses.2019 - Fifty years of Unix and Linux advances
Jon Hall observes the 50th anniversary of the creation of UNIX, and generously includes Linux in the observance. Linux does not deserve this, and the FOSDEM audience does not deserve Jon Hall, but on the bright side this talk will ruin the "100% useless dipshittery" streak in this year's FOSDEM lineup. That's right: they can't even fuck things up correctly.Closing FOSDEM 2019
if they'd just started with this talk we'd all be spared a lot of noiseCommunications
Mattermost’s Approach to Layered Extensibility in Open Source Why, you might ask, would "open source" layered extensibility be different from any other extensibility approach (layered or otherwise) in any other software? It would not, of course, but the CEO of the company needed a reason to fly to Brussels for the weekend, and this is as good a reason as any to write it off as a business expense. Spoiler alert: "layered extensibility" here is a code for "everything is webshit."
Matrix in the French State
What happens when a government adopts open source & open standards for all its internal communication?
DNS over HTTPS - the good, the bad and the ugly
Why, how, when and who gets to control how names are resolved
Netflix and FreeBSD
Using Open Source to Deliver Streaming Video
Databases
PostgreSQL Goes to 11! A database management program has not yet ceased development. The speaker will read the version control commit log for one hour.
Hugepages and databases
working with abundant memory in modern servers
PostgreSQL vs. fsync
How is it possible that PostgreSQL used fsync incorrectly for 20 years, and what we'll do about it.
Raft in Scylla
Consensus in an eventually consistent database
Hardware
The TPM2 software community
Getting started as a user, becoming a contributor
Some corporate programmers are released from the mines long enough to pretend anyone cares about the things they work on. The anxiety and excitement induced by being allowed out of the cave caused them to paste the talk description into the web form twice. Nobody noticed.
Mender - an open source OTA software update manager for IoT
This talk is an hour-long sales pitch for the speaker's employer, which sells a product that other companies can use to provision TLS certificates and spyware updates to touchscreen refrigerators. In order to lure idiots into attending the sales talk, the speaker will point out that the license of the software conforms to the thematic goals of the conference.
Tesla Hacking to FreedomEV!
Bringing Freedom to electric vehicle software
Go on Microcontrollers: Small Is Going Big
TinyGo takes the Go programming language to the "final frontier" where we could not go before... running directly on microcontrollers.
Miscellaneous
Love What You Do, Everyday! A bureaucrat will ramble incoherently about seeking life advice from copyright law cultists.
Crostini: A Linux Desktop on ChromeOS
Some Googles will present propaganda in order to sell low-quality laptops, on the principle that they can sometimes be tricked into functioning like actual laptops. With any luck, this will give Adsense valuable insights into the behavior patterns of gullible idiots, which sounds like a pretty juicy demographic to advertise in front of.
Making the next blockbuster game with FOSS tools
Using Free Software tools to achieve high quality game visuals.
Open Source C#, .NET, and Blazor - everywhere PLUS WebAssembly
A Microsoft tries to convince everyone to install a shitload of .dll files onto their Linux systems in order to use expensive IDEs to produce the same shit everyone else already does. Along the way, the Microsoft will brag about tricking many rubes into working for free on corporate platform code.SUSI.AI: An Open Source Platform for Conversational Web
The rich and lengthy tradition of the Free Software community making inferior copies of other, better-engineered systems continues, in this instance enabling underemployed nerds the world over to shout things at their computers. Shouting at computers while some shoddy software desperately attempts to parse and respond to this input is apparently preferable to using any of the well-supported existing input devices that come with every single computer on earth, so this talk will be well-attended and extremely beneficial to anyone who has nothing better to do on Sunday afternoon.Online Privacy
SSPL, Confluent License, CockroachDB License and the Commons Clause
Is it freedom to choose to be less free?
This talk, from a Facebook lawyer apparently being punished with public relations duty, has nothing to do with privacy at all. The entire point of the talk is to make the audience believe that Facebook gives a single shit about their opinions regarding intellectual property law. The actual product whose weaponized license caused a shitstorm in nerd circles is not mentioned even once: misdirection, or idiocy? That's a trick question; nobody can tell the difference.
Solid: taking back the Web through decentralization
App development as we know it will radically change
An academic, enrolled in the Tim Berners-Lee fan club, will engage in a performance-art piece hypothesizing about a world where anyone gives a shit about what Tim Berners-Lee wants. In accordance with the colorful tradition of web-reinvention nutcases, bold claims and broad promises will rain down upon a rapt audience. After forty minutes, the speaker will ask for questions from the audience, who will respond by spending ten minutes' sober contemplation of profound questions like "what if we COULD do things better?," "I wonder what room I was supposed to have been in?," and "if I leave now, can I get something to eat before the next unhinged rant?"
The Current and Future Tor Project
Updates from the Tor Project
Algorithmic Sovereignty and the state of community-driven open source development
Is there a radical interface pedagogy for algorithmic governementality[sic]?
Open Source at DuckDuckGo
Raising the Standard of Trust Online
Performance
Fine-grained Distributed Application Monitoring Using LTTng The audience for this talk, whose topic is low-level systems diagnosis, will consist entirely of webshits who are under the delusion that "distributed" means it uses http as a core protocol. None of them will understand it, but understanding is not required to paste the relevant keywords into the end of their resumes.
eBPF powered Distributed Kubernetes performance analysis
Because Kubernetes, a clustered-application execution platform, was invented by Google, there is no way to usefully inspect any aspect of it. The speaker is one of a large class of poor sods who have to resort to injecting code at runtime into the kernel to make up for the absense of fundamental operational functionality. The talk will be well-attended, because injecting code at runtime into the operating system kernel is simpler than debugging Kubernetes.
Perl 11
The Future of Saint Larry's Language
Storage
Better loop mounts with NBD
Take your loop mounts to the next level with nbdkit
A Red Hat drone thinks that the problem with local filesystems is they don't have enough of the network stack involved. This talk will explain how to rectify this omission, as well as some tips on how to make block storage as unreliable as everything else Red Hat pays to develop.
ELI5: ZFS Caching
Explain Like I'm 5: How the ZFS Adaptive Replacement Cache works
A FreeBSD developer thinks that five-year-olds are interested in why storage software caches things into RAM and how that cache is managed. The only five-year-olds the speaker has ever met are bugs in the software being discussed. The word 'works' in the talk title is to be interpreted as an aspiration. We can reevaluate things after the FreeBSD project deletes all this shit and gets in line behind the Linux weenies.
Data services in a hybrid cloud world with Ceph
Making data as portable as your stateless microservices
Square Kilometre Array and its Software Defined Supercomputer
... and a very fast parallel file system