This was my first time at FOSDEM.
It was a great opportunity to catch up with Greg Stein, Allison Randal, Rob McKinnon and Gervase Markham just to name a few.
There were some outstanding talks from license agreements to Jabber to XMPP to Linux Bios.
I used to spend time talking with Slava Bizyayev, who unfortunately passed away last year, on the area of embedding control signals in TCP/IP and using them to trigger activity in the the BIOS. The thing about the BIOS is that it is hidden from the OS, it has access to all devices and quite honestly you don't know what it is upto.
So it was personally very poignant for me to hear Ronald G Minnich on linux bios.
An illuminating talk at a very good event.
There were of course many good speakers, of special note is Simon Phipps and his update on the open sourcing of Java.