The meetBSD 2008 conference recently held at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, USA brought together more than 150 users and developers of the various flavors of the BSD operating system. The conference featured some great speakers, including talks by Robert Watson, Philip Paeps, Kris Moore and many others. There was also a panel to discuss the Google Summer of Code™ program, hosted by Murray Stokely and Leslie Hawthorn of Google. They were joined on stage by former mentors and students from the FreeBSD and NetBSD projects to give an overview of the program, some of the amazing results, and some tips and stories about participating. Saturday's content wrapped up with impromptu breakout sessions to discuss PC-BSD, FreeBSD, security issues, and other topics.
After the first day of the conference, attendees were taken by bus to the Zen Buddha Lounge in Mountain View for a private party to celebrate the 15th Anniversary of the FreeBSD operating system. A great time was had by all and, like most birthday parties, this one included a cake! We went a step further though: our cake was shaped like the FreeBSD logo in 3D, complete with horns. Dr. Kirk McKusick had the honors of cutting the cake and handing out a few pieces.
Thanks to help from the Open Source Program Office at Google we were able to setup a new YouTube channel for technical BSD content, allowing us to upload high quality full hour-long videos of talks and tutorials from BSD Conferences. May of the talks from MeetBSD 2008 are already available, and videos from MeetBSD 2007 and NYCBSDCon 2008 have already been uploaded. You can view these videos at http://www.youtube.com/bsdconferences. You may also want to check out photos from the conference and aforementioned birthday party.
The main conference was followed by an invitation-only FreeBSD Developer Summit which was a great success. We had over 30 attendees from the FreeBSD Developer Community as well as engineers from Yahoo, NetApp, Isilon, QLogic, Huawei, Google, Juniper, Cisco, Facebook, ISC, Metaweb, and other technology companies using or looking at using FreeBSD. There were formal presentations on the first day, followed by less structured hacking during the second day. The agenda of talks for the first day is available here.
Hard at work at the FreeBSD Developer Summit
(photo credit: Murray Stokely)
