BSD at SCALE 14x

Larry the BSD Guy

As I may have mentioned during the SCALE 14x coverage, one of the disadvantages of the glorious burden of working for a great event such as SCALE is that I don’t get out of the media room enough. The fact is, I can’t — herding the cats known as the tech media and processing various social media posts around the event keeps me in the room.

But I do get to go fix things occasionally, and that’s when I make the rounds on the expo floor.

BSD had itself its own row of booths in the expanded expo hall — FreeBSD, the FreeBSD Foundation, and OpenBSD were all neighbors on the exhibit floor. As is common for all the conferences we attend, Dru Lavigne and I — she moreso than me — got to catch up on things, and I took the time to drop in on her “Doc Like and Egyptian” presentation (though, burdened with a radio, I was called away to put out a minor “fire,” rhetorically speaking, in the press room).

I also had a chance to talk with Deb Goodkin of the FreeBSD Foundation, and she allowed me a photo with one of the booth’s denizens, the BSD goat. We had a chance to talk about the progress being made on the FreeBSD Code of Conduct. She said it was progressing well, and I found that promising.

One more thing: Shortly before SCALE 14x, I had encountered a problem with LibreOffice on PC-BSD in which I couldn’t save anything without it crashing. I bring this up because LibreOffice is a mission-critical program for me that, well, as a writer I really can’t do without. There was a 50-50 chance that I would have to use another laptop running Linux, however the LibreOffice glitch righted itself and I was able to use PC-BSD on a laptop for the duration of the show. With the exception of being unable to read SD cards — yeah, that’s on me and I’m fixing that — PC-BSD performed flawlessly during the course of the show.

Looking ahead to next year, I understand through some high-ranking sources on both sides of the proverbial street that BSD will have a larger presence at SCALE next year. This would include the probability of a BSD track at SCALE 15x. As the “BSD guy” on the SCALE Team, you can be sure that I’ll be part of that discussion on the SCALE side going forward. If you’ve ever wanted to speak publicly on BSD, submitting a talk for SCALE 15x would be a good place to start, if of course you aren’t submitting talks to other conferences already.

See you next week.

We’re currently in the midst of our 2016 Indiegogo fundraising drive. Your support is crucial. Won’t you please visit our fundraising page and make a contribution to support FOSS Force?