 Good evening. Hello. Thank you everyone for coming. I'd like to introduce to you someone who has appeared on the stage 17 times before who's also asked me to let you know that he has worked very very hard on this presentation. Please give a warm welcome to Steve Goodwin. Thank you so as that part of the slide says my name is Steve and as that part says I'm a bit of a geek. If we're all in the correct room, and I really hope we all are, for the next 50 minutes I'm going to talk about FOSDEM and how it's changed and how it hasn't changed over the last 20 years. I'm going to start off with the origins going back to 2001. Go through the middle years and then the sort of the later years when things have kind of settled down a bit. And I'm so happy it started in 2001. It makes counting how many FOSDEMs there have been so much easier. No gatepost errors. So where do we start? Who am I? What have I done that's so impressive to me that I deserve to be on this stage? So we have a slide saying who I am or as it should be called the ego slide. This is where the speaker gets to brag about themselves for 20 minutes while everyone else is forced to listen. Not in this case. These are the stuff I've done. Oh that's me with hair and a smile. Neither exist anymore. So I've been to all of these FOSDEM thingies. I've given a stack of talks. I've done little things, bigger things. But the thing that's important is what's not on that slide. Nothing on there says I am FOSDEM staff. I've never worked for them. I've never been a volunteer. All I've done is just turned up. So everything you see is based on my personal experience of turning up and going wherever there was a free dev route. So where did it start? Well it started with this little email. Wednesday, December the 6th at 11 o'clock in the morning. I hope you don't consider this as spam as I think lots of you could be interested by this. This is in the pseudo users mailing list. Now I'm a user of pseudo but I would never consider joining the mailing list. But there are enough people apparently on that mailing list that thought that's a good idea. We should do that. And that's the first line. That's the bit that I quite like. I hope you don't consider this as spam. This essentially is the Linux tool valves, our version of Linux tool valves just for fun. This is the thing that started it. If this mail had got itself into a kill file or a spam folder, none of us would be here right now. So it's because of that bit that we're kind of lucky. So as we say, the origins were in 2001 and it started in Brussels and it's always in Brussels and I'm kind of happy that it is because the very first indexing system was created in Brussels. Wasn't Google? It was the Mundanium in 1934 by Paul Oclet. He had groups of people going through every single book they could find and creating indexes of everything in those books. It was a slow manual version of Google but it worked and it was created here. So I'm very happy that it's here. I'm also happy that it's free to attend. Not because of the money aspect. This is free as in freedom, not free as in beer. By the time you're taking into account the hotels and the travel, an extra tenor for a conference is nothing. But for someone that doesn't have that, that puts a barrier to entry and by having it free to end it's always been a barrier. Forget I said that bit. Can we get it out of the live stream? No, we can't. So there was a registration but no one really used it and it started as Olstem rather than Olstem by Raphael Baudin. Is there anyone Belgian in the audience? How's this pronounced? How's it pronounced? Raphael Baudoin. Thank you. Oh sorry, what's your name? Raphael Baudoin. Thank you, thank you. So thank you for coming along. Thanks for inviting me. So glad we can pronounce your name now. You started this in 2001. Yes. Why? Well, at that time it was the big boom of free software and open source and Linux was growing in the enterprise. Before that Linux was not used. It was not considered serious enough to be used in the enterprise. But then it started growing and there were conferences but those conferences were rather commercial. You had a Linux expo in Paris but I went there and I mean I felt like not comfortable there. I wanted to hear technical talks, meet people, meet developers and there you had people in suits and talking commercial. It didn't interest me. And when coming back I thought well let's try something and it started in November 2000 trying to get people to come along. It was, yeah, not envisioned to grow that big at that time. So it sounds like it was intended to be fun. It was intended to be fun from the start because we are whole ear to have fun, no? No? Yeah? Okay, so we want to enjoy the weekend. I wanted people coming to the weekend enjoy the time here. That's why we have some serious talks about technical stuff and some less serious things like the free software song, the full-stim dance. Hang on, wait, wait, wait. Full-stim dance? Well, people know it, people know it. You know it, no? Does anyone want to see the full-stim dance? Do you want to do the full-stim? I see that coming, yeah. Okay. The key thing for the full-stim dance is to be relaxed, okay? No stress. I give you the microphone. And how did it start? Well, it started by Damien Sanderas, which is known from Echiga. He was one of the first involved in the organization. And he was doing a lot, like most of us at that time because the team was very small. And he said, yeah, you know, the full-stim weekend, it's always like running, running, running, running, running. And that's how we started the full-stim dance. Now you know everything. So I was going to ask, actually, as well, the first ones must have been difficult to organize if no one had ever heard of it. Yeah, yeah, indeed. It really started from nothing. So the concept was clear from the beginning. It was a technical conference for developers, by developers. But then you have to get people to the event. And to get the people to the event, you have to organize something, have talks. And to have people interested in the talks, you try to get people that are known. And that's where you start to get some problems because how do you get people to a known conference? Well, that's why it started the weekend that was right before the Linux conference in Paris. I thought that would be easier to get known people to the conference. And it kind of was, but then you had the problem of getting those people over. You had travel costs, hotel costs. And it was very hard to get some sponsoring for the first event. But then I had the luck that it was the boom of Linux in the enterprise. There were some companies that made big IPOs at that time. And one of these companies was via Linux. And they had a Belgian there for the commercial side. And they decided to support for them, which was called Osdem at the time. And that's how we got a lot of via Linux employees at the conference. And we had the possibility to invite a lot more speaker and paying their travel. And that's how we had some big name like Rasmus Leverdorf from PHP. We had Rastaman. We had Theodor from Nmap. So that's really helped a lot to get people speakers at the event. And once you have well-known people speaking at the event, well, you have interest growing. And in the end, when the event started, we didn't know how many people would come at the event. Of course, that's why we tried to put a registration page at the first event. But it was optional. To make it clear, you are always welcome. And we ended up with 600 people for the first event, which was not expected when I started the organization. But you felt that the event was growing and the interest was there. So it was not a big surprise to have that much people. But it was really a good thing. And a lot of efforts went in the event. And it was a good thing to see the success of the first event. Excellent. One final thing. There was some talk on my mailing lists for people to come in the oldest Fosden shirt they have. In my case, it's the oldest Fosden shirt I have that I can still fit. I found this picture online of you back in 2001. Do you still have that shirt? Well, you know, that's an old t-shirt 20 years ago. I have a girlfriend. She complains that my t-shirts are too old. I should change. But thank you very much. Give it back to you. That's my feel. Incredible. So, what was 2001 like? I'm pretty sure there were people in this room who weren't alive at that point. Are you laughing because that's you? Or because you're aware of someone that... That's a long time. So what was it like in the real world? You know, not this cosy thing that we inhabit. Well, the world population is now up to 7.4 billion. 7.8 billion, actually. So we've managed to amass another 1.8 billion in the time that this conference has been running. We've had Euros, George W. Bush was the president, and the issue matter had landed. Now, that's a space probe which for the first time had landed on an asteroid. Now, that's quite an impressive feat for anyone on any day of the year. But this for me is quite interesting. Not because I like space, I'm a space fan. That's kind of a given. But back then, satellites were landed on asteroids, or they were sent into space, and it was always proprietary, proprietary hardware, proprietary software. We now have open source hardware in space. We have open source software running stuff. We've got CubeSat. It's now possible for us to be able to build our own satellites and stick them in orbit, all from the time when this started to now. And I find that quite impressive. Oh, and Billy Eilish was born in December 2001. Is there anyone over 30 who knows who Billy Eilish is? I don't believe her for you. But again, she is writing the New James Bond theme, so maybe you should. So our pop stars are now, oh, are younger than this conference. And in tech, we had no Facebook in 2001. I had no idea that was an applause queue. I thought that was information. There was no Twitter. Oh, let's have a muted one for that. No Stack Overflow. Oh, down the level, have we? And no Uber. But unfortunately, if it wasn't for Uber, some of us would still be stuck on that bus. Amazon Google, they were all really young, and the fun one, because a lot of us are illyxy type people, Microsoft had released XP. That's now end of line. Microsoft's next operating system, Windows 7, is now out of line. We have managed to pass two versions of Windows. One of the biggest companies, the biggest products, and we beat two of them. So, 2001 in FOSTA in terms. Here we go. This is not page one, by the way. This is all of it. This is every single one of the 31 talks present in that first weekend. And there's a lot of good stuff on there. One thing you'll notice if you can read the writing. Every session was pretty much an hour and a half or an hour. We've got talks on there. Security. Databases. Samba. PHP. And somewhere there's a quantum computing tool. There. Quantum computing back in 2001. We were so far ahead of the curve. But then again, also 2001 was the year of Livex on the desktop. If you like that joke, you will like it when I do it again in a minute. So the 30 years for me were characterised a lot by these longer talks with deep dives. We had, I hope his name is pronounced Rindal, who created the RSA encryption system. He came and spoke here and gave one of the most technical talks ever. I think just to try and find out if there were any technical people at FOSTA. I think it's now safe to say there are technical people at FOSTA and he was quite impressed. Also, back then we had Clam AV, which I remember. I was sat there where you are and I was just going, wow, I understand what antivirus thing does. I understand the code. I can read the code. It's open for me. But the bit in the middle about how the algorithms were created was something I'd never really understood. That talk was deep enough and long enough for me to be able to understand it. That was incredible. I was sat where you are. You've got to be impressed in 20 years, OK? What else? All this picture, by the way, just to point out. This is, I think, 2002, 2003. You'll notice the lack of food vans. You'll also notice the lack of people. This was a time where you could actually take photographs of your friends and not get photo bombed. Also, I think there's about three or four writers for Linux Magazine in that picture. It wasn't intentional. It wasn't a meet-up thing. It just so happens to all write for that same magazine. Although these are meant to be my friends, I'm not taking the picture and I'm not in the picture. So I have no idea where they were. Foster Info Desk. Donations always have a thing. You donate 25 euros. You've got the t-shirt. Donate 50 euros. You've got a t-shirt and the chance of winning an O'Reilly book. Or you can donate 35 and you get an O'Reilly pocket guide book. There's always these tiers that you can invest in. And then, and still 25 euros now. Don't take that as a thing to price, like, by the way. It's just an observation. Also, Foster Minister, a bunch of Waco loonies at your service. I don't know if they still use that tagline, but it might still apply. What else? There was always sponsorship. As Raphael was saying, you kind of need sponsorship to be able to get people in. And it is difficult. VA Linux was there and O'Reilly managed to pick up the baton in the second year for a lot of things. But there was never this whole, there was a sponsor and they would be doing a 20 minute presentation every day on their thing. Never happened. O'Reilly had a stand out there. That was it. That was their sort of promotion thing, if you like. So we've always done pretty well for the not spamming things. And over these early years, the dev rooms grew and dev rooms, so one day this room would be point of computing dev room, another day that would be the IoT dev room. And we'll come back to dev rooms later on to show you some of the success stories that Foster must have in those dev rooms. I mailed Miguel a little while ago. You probably recognise him from either Mono or Nome or something that he's done. He reminded me of the this is Coca-Cola. Was anyone there when he was heckled with the line this is Coca-Cola? Not many. This time about, he was demoing Mono and was showcasing the different uses. And one of them was with Unity, which is a proprietary 3D graphics engine. And he was demonstrating that it would work, not that he was necessarily promoting Unity. So from the back of the room, someone shouted this is Coca-Cola. This is Coca-Cola which didn't make any sense. Thought it was a translation problem. What it actually transpired is that the person didn't like the idea of proprietary software being used with 3D software. And that sort of thing was not uncommon. Not the heckling of this is Coca-Cola, but the idea of proprietary things were always bad and it was always evil. Nowadays, half of you may will have an iPhone. I'm using a Mac. Yeah. Actually, I think I've got 50-50 of the room on that one. But I can guarantee if I had done that in 2001 with a Mac it would have been more than 99-1 against me. We have at least grown up in that sense. Because I don't like my Mac, but I use it to be fair. What else? Josette she was manning the O'Reilly store for the longest time. And if you're watching, Josette, hello! This is not going to end good. At the second we have a power person for me. So Josette manned the O'Reilly stand for the longest time. It was actually her that managed to get us the second round of funding for the second post-dem, which would be the first real post-dem rather than post-dem. The mail went into her spam folder essentially. It's like, oh yeah, I'll look at it later, I'll look at it later, I'll get round to it. And it wasn't nothing, I think Raphael was the one that mailed back a couple weeks and said, are you going to give us the money or not? And she went, oh, sorry, yeah, I'll get on to it. And because of that, we're able to get a second round, and as a consequence get the third and the fourth, and O'Reilly managed to have a stand here, most she is. And we know why they're not here this year, unfortunately. So next up, it's going to boot. Okay, can we switch to that one then? Things were better. So here we have a technical reason why I hate it. And I have no idea why, this is not a microphone. That's my mic, I just did that like a microphone. What's in this stuff? I thought I'll get myself a nice little beer. I've always done this, by the way. I don't know if anyone's ever noticed. When I first started doing foster, I didn't see anyone drinking beer while they were presenting. I thought it was like a health and safety thing when the university didn't allow it, something like that. But I got to do my first talk and I thought, I'm in Belgium. I should try and fit in. They just eat chocolate and they drink beer. I should drink beer when I do my talk. So I got a beer and I put it on the top and no one told me to take it away. So I thought, oh, maybe beer is allowed. So then I opened the beer and it went ssss. No one's ears picked up and said, oh, he's doing beer, that's not allowed. So I just started the talk and I went, right, here we go. And I've done it ever, ever since. Which is a nice sort of tradition to have until you start getting multiple talks in the same day. And you realise this is really not healthy. I mean, this is my third today. The third bit and the third talk. So already maybe that's why I'm using it as a microphone. Oh, no. But it is one of those things that you just, every year you learn something new about either the place or the culture. And it happens quite a lot. One year, we decided, okay, we've done the foster thing, but we've never done the Brussels thing. Every year we would come along, we would come along, every year we would come along, we'd see the inside of the theatres here and we'd see the inside of the bars out there, but we'd never see anything else of Brussels. Well, it's not in the daylight. So we thought, next year, we'll take a day off work and we'll stay Sunday night and see Brussels on the Monday. And that's what we did. We booked an extra hotel, booked a train, we go along, fantastic. We had a list of museums to see. And this is back before Google and stuff, so we were just relying on guidebooks, essentially. And we made the list of all the museums we wanted to see and we got up nice and early at 10 o'clock to go and see the museums. Turns out, all the museums and all the galleries in Brussels are, you know, the Museum of Comics Open Bracket's Femela Lundi. Now, I don't know what a Femela Lundi museum is, but all the museums in Brussels were also run by Femela Lundi. It took me a while to learn enough French to realise that Femela Lundi means closed on Monday, and we're just wasted a day. Luckily, we now have translation apps, which allow me to be the stupid Englishman that only speaks one language to get around Brussels. And this is one of those many things that come out, especially the social elements of Brussels and of Fozden. So we're ready to go again. Okay. So the first few years from about 2000 to 2000, 2001 to 2007 follow pretty much the same idea. You have a number of main tracks in here, you have a number of dev rooms, and every year it goes up by one or two more dev rooms. By 2007, the formats are kind of stabilised. Lightning talks have been introduced, which back then were quite a novelty. 15 minutes each talk. Now with a lot of talks coming down to 25, there's a lot more parallels between new and old, as you see, things haven't really changed. And that was the inspiration to the title, the cliche of constant change. The whole thing of the more things change, the more they stay the same. So a lot of the main talks now are becoming more like the Lightning talks were back then. And those stats will definitely be erroneous, I can tell you that. So yes, we talked about rosette. And here are the basic stats. As I just said, they go up gradually, always up and to the right. All the stats you'll see go up and to the right. That's important. This is the early first few years. So 2002, we hosted the free software awards on this stage. So naturally the award for 2001 was given in February 2002 and so on. So all the favourite names came along to stand on the stage and tell us what they'd done and why that was important. Key signing parties started in 2005. I personally call them key signing events. People standing outside in the cold in February in Brussels doesn't sound like a party to me, but if that's your bag, you go for it. Key signing events. The Lightning talks, as I've said, they did start in 2005, but back then not every talk was updated on the site. There was a CMS from 2002 onwards, but not everyone was forced to put their information into it at the start. So a lot of those earlier talks will have been lost. 2012, however, we have Pentebuff. For those that have not spoken here, this is the system you have to put your details in about what you wish to speak about and what the topic's going to be and what room you think it applies. It's a big chunk of XML, but it does kind of work, even though it has occasionally put the same speaker in two different rooms at the same time. Happens. 2014, Christoph created that. It was kind of, if I can recall my slides, I think there's about, yes, 4,000 active installations. But that doesn't include anything on asteroid, because that stuff apparently is not tracked. So there's probably a lot more people who have installed that than are actually on the screen now. According to the people I spoke to earlier, the first video box is these nice wooden ones. They were first created and put together in 2015 and then first put into boxes in 2016. So that's quite a relatively new thing. But even before that, people were setting up cameras on tables and just filming it. There used to be an old website called shortstopTV where people would upload these sort of videos. And that's noticeable because the conference is older than YouTube. It's also older than Flickr as well and we'll come through a good reason to that as well later. And 2016, very importantly, we started having glossy brochures. Now, for those that weren't there, let me show you what the brochures used to look like when I was a wee kid and all this was feels. This is probably so small you probably can't see it at the back. It's a couple of sheets of paper, they put together. And that's the entire conference program, everything. Fast forward a couple of years. This is 2002. This is 2008. You can see already that by 2008, Fosden were having to buy a more expensive brand of staple. For some reason, 2015 had a different colour. But then, by 2016, we have these. These are the ones that you probably all now recognise. Big glossies and enough information to warrant a separate one for each day. Quite an impressive feat. Particularly as I've still got them. So coming back to the cliche of constant change. Every year, the dev rooms change. There's a few more. Sometimes old ones fall out of favour. But they're always there. Stalls is an introduction. There's always lots and lots of stalls. And for this, I will need to find some notes that is going to be quite interesting. Honest it will be. So, yeah. There's lots and lots of things going on. Actually, I'm going to come back to that. I think there's a reason for that. So, going back quickly to the dev rooms. The dev rooms have often changed their names. So, sometimes it will be the MySQL dev room. Sometimes it will be the MySQL, MariaDB and friends dev room. Sometimes it will be the MySQL and friends dev room. I don't know what MariaDB to one not being considered a friend in the other one. But I've yet to see a Postgres and MySQL and friends dev room. Can anyone tell me why? So, there was a case in K Building, which is where most of the stands are now. And there was a time OpenSuzo got beer. I think they've done it again this year. And they've got a number of OpenSuzo beers at the stand. The Mozilla people, so I'm told, went over to their stand, bought all of their beer and took it back to the Mozilla stand. The Mozilla people then put a sticky label on all of the beers and sold it on their stand. Therefore, that is the first time anyone has taken a beer and then forked it. There's also stories of people who have driven here back in 2001-2002. Which is impressive from the point of view of no GPS for humans back then. It was all military grade. So people driving around with paper maps trying to work out how to get here. That must have been fun. We've got a number of dev rooms wins which are some of which I'll come back to later. But one of the ones to actually point out is Freedom Box. Now, this was something that Evan Mogul talked about in 2011 on this stage and in 2013. And it was good enough to send me a little update video of where they've got to. Let's see if that will play. Has that been a good thing or a bad thing? Thank you to Steve for inviting me to come on Free Software because we believe that technological freedom was absolutely necessary to the survival of civil liberty. We thought that computers that didn't work for their users that their users couldn't understand couldn't change, couldn't fix and couldn't share would be computers that would eliminate the freedom and unfortunately after all these years together it fossed them after all these decades of work. We are in the place in which if we can't deliver freedom to people using free software we cannot be sure that liberty will survive. That was why I started the Freedom Box project to see if we could use the smallest cheapest computers available in the world to deliver real freedom respecting services to everybody. Now after all these years we are ready. This, a Freedom Box manufactured under license by Alamex in Bulgaria is the first commercial product using our wonderful free software to deliver freedom. We can also run everything from an orange pie to a raspberry pie to an Arduino board and a virtual instance in the AWS cloud. All of this happened because people who were together with us in Brussels saw the importance of this vision because free software programmers from around the world now want to deliver freedom to users everywhere to their families, their friends and their communities. This is what FOSDEM is about this is what Freedom Box is about. This is the life we have lived together and for which I am so very grateful. Thank you to FOSDEM. Thank you to Steve. Thank you to those who believe in freedom. Thanks to Evan. So of course it wouldn't be FOSDEM if it wasn't in Brussels I guess and that's kind of helped because in the same way that FOSDEM was able to get its first speakers by shall we say, borrowing some from the next conference. Other conferences have started up around FOSDEM and around the time. PG Day for example has been going quite a few years now to coincide with FOSDEM. There was a git thing last year that was at and also Java has their committers workshop around this sort of time as well I believe which has really helped because it's kind of worked in the same way that servers have worked. There's a monolith which is FOSDEM and then we create microservices. Those are the div rooms and then it's function as a service which are the lightning talks, the birth of a feather talks and then those reaching out to other conferences they create outside of the FOSDEM tracks now known as the FOSDEM fringe. But of course I was saying it's not all work and we do try and pretend to have some fun. There is this misconception that geeks don't socialize. That is not true. Anyone that's been in the delirium on Friday night knows that's not true. The only thing that might be considered true is that we don't want to socialize with people like that. People are things, oh you're a bit geeky, we don't like you. We socialize. And these are the only clean pictures I'm allowed to use. So this is what we had back in 2001, 2002. I'm showing this for one particular reason. There's no camera on that camera phone. Yes, they did exist. Phones without a camera meant we could get away with a lot of stuff that we probably couldn't now. The other problem with this, it means people had to take their rather expensive SLR cameras into pubs if we wanted to get any pictures. Luckily, some people were brave enough to take their phones in nice cameras into pubs and this is one of them. This is in the Royal of Spain on Grand Plus. This is where we had the first number of Friday night beer events. As you can see, there's actually space in there. Probably room for a few more people around that table. And also, we have seats. And also in this particular place because there weren't that many of us, the bartenders would come around, they'd take our drinks order and at the end of the night they'd say, what did you drink? Now, I don't know if these bartenders have ever experienced people having alcohol before. But asking someone, what have you drunk? It's like, well, just two points of shandy me, mate. It's not going to cut it, particularly when some of my friends don't drink at all. So when you get to the end of the night and they just say, I had two Coca-Cola's. They go, no, you didn't. Luckily, I'm proud to say that after many years of doing this, I now understand how strong Belgian beer is and how many I can have before I need to leave delirium in order to get in for the Saturday keynote. There's also parties and dinners going on most of the evenings, Saturday is usual, particularly for us a lot. Again, that's me with more hair. And this is where, you know, a lot of the stories and a lot of the real things come out. The information that you don't hear on the tracks and I think I'm allowed to tell this story. At a table once, and there's about seven or eight of us all there, and one person is complaining about how hard it is to compile KDE and how hard it is to package KDE, not realising that the person who compiled and packaged KDE was sat next to them. Man's explaining was not invented recently. We've been doing it for years. It's also in the same restaurant, actually. We were sat around and we thought, let's get a picture and we asked the waitress, could you take a picture and give it to the camera and she says, okay everybody, say cheese. So what do you think every single geek at that table did in unison thinking it would be a funny joke? They said fromage. The only French they obviously know. And even more dinners. Again, it's one of those things that you never know who you're going to end up getting sat next to and talking to at these sort of events. I've probably got that very wrong. Created by, sat next to me one night to dinner, Phil Hazel from X in Fame, sat next opposite me another night at dinner. This is not me bragging, by the way. This is normal. This happened pretty much every night to somebody during the course of FOSDA. And the city tours were a comparatively recent thing. I could never quite find out when they started. But now the partners of us lot have the option of going out to get a free city tour so they can see Brussels. Oh, you know, it's a nice thing to do. I don't know if that means more people are going to do it next year because I've told you all it exists. But it's a thing that's been laid on and it was always for partners. Never for wives and girlfriends. So occasionally we get things right. Except for this thing, Bermatt, Baccaru. There are probably people in this room that have played it. I know at least where two of them are. I'm not going to ask for show of hands. But Bermatt, Baccaru. It's a game to be played late at night in the bars of Brussels. FOSDA is quite a long conference, quite grueling. You're up quite early, you're out quite late. So even when you sat in a rock club in the middle of Brussels you've been up for 12 hours, you're a bit tired, you may fall asleep. It is their responsibility of other people with you to place beer mats on your head one at a time. One beer mat per person. Whoever puts the beer mat on the head when that person wakes up loses and buys the next round. There are no real winners in this. Except for that poor sap who's like, oh wait, that's me. So what is it like today? Well, it looks a lot of the history. So what sort of numbers have we got here? And I wrote a short script that would go through the history of the conference. But before I take you through that I'm just going to do a one-minute thing walking over here. Because 20 years is quite literally a long time. It is a generation. And in the same way that lots of people have come into our lives over the last 20 years we've also lost a lot as well. We're not the only people. We've all lost someone at some point in that time. And it's unfortunately inevitable, but there we have it. So moving on, let's get down some good old serious mucking about. And all these stats will have caveats attached to them. As I say, I have gone through all the old websites and did a copy and paste of them. So I might have missed things. There may be names which I've got incorrect. It's on GitHub, so if I made a typo I do accept pull requests. We might eventually get a full record of everything that happened at Vostem. So in just this year we've had 817 talks by 781 different speakers every year up and to the right, always increasing, always steadily. Now obviously this number is kind of contentious. We say 817 talks should we include the beginning talks should we include LPI the exams and that sort of thing. So you could vary this by a few, but this gives you a rough idea of the scale of which we're speaking. There are 55 dev rooms. As you see, the number of dev rooms increases as does the number of talks. In fact, if you were to go and listen to every single talk that's happened over just this weekend if my memory serves nine and a half weeks every day, eight hours a day including Saturdays and Sundays to get through everything for just this. Now you might play that up over the last 20 years. If you wanted to catch up with Vostem the Vostem binge watch channel would last you until August. These are the speakers speaking this weekend. Well, no, that's technically that's a picture of the speakers and if you squint hard enough you can just about make out the Vostem logo in amongst all of that. As far as I know, everyone is included my apologies if I managed to miss someone because there was a late change or something like that. So, if we accumulate all of these numbers what sort of totals do you think we're going to get? Well, let's start with the number of talks. In total since started 7,281. That is pretty much an inconceivable number. 4,001 unique speakers unique. That's more people than attended the first 4 Vostems put together and 149 different dev rooms. Now I think I've got rid of all the typos in there and embedded and embedded an automotive and so forth. The same dev room had several titles during its lifetime. The graphics dev room used to be a small dev room I believe but still 149 different subjects in open source which is not surprising it's a big industry and you realize this when you walk out. If you ever give a talk and you really should if you give a talk and you walk out the strangest thing happens you're in the room you're looking at 100, 200 people in this case 2,000 people right now I feel like the most important person in open source that there is that's not the laugh I'll tell you when I'm doing the funnies when I walk out that door I am nobody everyone else is more famous than I am everyone else has done more been on better projects more involved projects because no matter how big your project is there's always another one that's bigger or more impressive and this is the dev room totals Mozilla well done you win hard lock embedded you kind of forgot that one so you'd have been caught up well but as you see the dev rooms are quite a flowing thing sometimes we have a lot of dev rooms at the start like GNOME and then afterwards like dev rooms not needed anymore and the space is taken up by other things like software defined radio I didn't even know that was a thing until I saw it at Foster and there's a lot of good stories from these things I think probably the biggest story is Java now originally there was a project called GNU class path anyone remember GNU class path yes and there was I think it was a free Java and an open Java and about 7 or 8 different Java type projects trying to do the open version well it turned out that someone managed to persuade some to open source their Java and the people that did it did it at FOSDEM so the reason we have open Java and the reason is FOSDEM which unfortunately means Larry didn't get to buy a yacht that year but I'm happy to trade Larry's yacht for open Java yes well done Java I'm sure we've got some of the Java people in that were responsible for that as well so you know we should buy them a beer later so the total in words so I went through every talk title for the last 20 years I removed the ands and the ofs and all those sort of tiny words and I built this now you've got all the obvious words in there you know like open and source and software and community but there were also two words in there that kind of stuck out to me and that was fun and the word profit so I was very curious on how I could make a profit with this open source but it turns out there were about 8 or 9 talks so go and do this for fun and profit go and do that for fun and profit every single time there's a for fun and profit talk you are required to keep this tradition going so in the conclusions it started small, very small incredibly hopelessly small and built up gradually small blocks that way there could never be too many surprises same as in code, make one change at a time then you know where the breakage is small things added continually always something new, always something else happening that ethos thing has not changed free is still good, free is still here dev rooms do seem to be the biggest draw now but as I say there are fringe events which keep cropping up every single year I mean nowadays we've got what's 700 talks here going on at any one time this year there were more talks than there were in the entirety of the first false dem basically you could take the first false dem in the morning session on Saturday and we could all be in the pub by lunchtime so what happens now how do I predict the future what is false dem going to be doing over the next 20 years well I can tell you exactly what false dem is going to be doing oh no sorry I've run out of time so I can't tell you what false dem is going to be doing over the next 20 years but it's all down to whatever you say, whatever we say it's our conference it's open, it's for us so I will finish my slide by updating my scorecard ding, there we go and normally I would finish on a slide of any questions but as I said at the beginning I'm not an organiser I'm not a volunteer, I just turn up so instead of any questions I'm going to phrase it any answers because you can contact me via the website on the twitter I want to hear your stories, I want to see what successes have you had because of false dem what has false dem helped for you because in 20 years time I was up there where I was sat 20 years ago and they're going to be up here saying how has free software helped and saved the world and it will be because of someone in this audience and some of the projects that are based here so with that I'll say thank you for your attention it's been the biggest audience I've ever seen thank you now if there's anyone here if there's anyone here wearing a false dem t-shirt what I'm trying to do is photograph of every year of false dem out those doors and out the front in about 20 minutes so if you've got like a 2001 shirt yep we want you there's not many of them around 2002 I'm wearing one of these underneath I've also got a few other shirts around so if you do have one of those old shirts and want to be in the picture make your way outside in about 20 minutes and you'll be able to be in that picture