Linuxtag blog (done after the event, so a bit lossy, just some highlights, details see here)
Tue: caught the train to Karlsruhe together with Jan. Fortunately it is not full, with us there are some 2.25 m demonstration banner poles... On the journey reading good news from the Dutch Parliament and the FFII computing restructuring budget. In Karlsruhe, we enter the beautiful Messezentrum straight into Linuxtag. Felix Klee and Jörg Hahn have perfectly prepared the event and booth, and we are preparing last details. In the evening Fabien and his lovely girl-friend fetch t-shirts for his http://www.openstuff.net/ booth and of course the in prison motif":http://dhcp42.de/ltag/ ones for us. (EP 803105 would put Jan, who developed oscommerce.org in jail). Attempted to attend Tue 22:00 CEST chat at bxl (sorry, no log this time).
Wed-Thu, before demo: explored neighbors (pingos, worldforge, and the pretty noisy forth) said hello and spread flyers to a lot of pple at boothes of debian, python-ldap, lugs, gentoo, mplayer, said thank you to apache's Ken for supporting webdemos:http://swpat.ffii.org/group/demo/mir0308/httpd.apache.org/ . An attempt to stuff the microsoft booth with patent flyers was however considered harmful, especially not good for linuxtag organizers (should have been obvious...). Also fixed some things at the lost+found department: Britta from linuxland got Alan Cox April t-shirts for auctioning for our cause (this included a reminder to read our email more frequently...). Also later, Jean-Marc from Strasbourg turned up at our booth, and explained that some of the Strasbourg demo banners were still well-preserved with him. On Thu, before the demo I went to Marco Schulze's SME perspective on software patents, which seemed to me a well-rounded talk (how do software patents affect even non-software businesses), though a coparticipant that left early (together with me) had wished some more detail here and there. Evening program was Brauhaus in Karlsruhe, then slept at AKK (waking up in the morning no sleeping-bags nearby me anymore, had I snorted so loud?).
Thu, demo: Jan and Joerg had organized music and sound systems and were already at Markt (market-place). After 17:30 and more so after 18:00 we spent most of the attention on get things out (banners, t-shirts), people out (the debianistas are hard to separate from there os...) and make the people grab the things (like banners and prisoner's costumes). Collecting the more sessile debianites I ran out of the hall at 18:15 and had to catch for the demo that already had moved (quite fastly). The actual demo route is short (15 mins?) and just follows the center of gravity from Kongresszentrum to markt. Around 1000 persons came, speeches were good, the having the Young Liberals and Attac framing the prisoners in the middle also was a nice sight, balloons (nitrogen instead of helium this time) encouraged sports, and we made the Spiegel. Congrats to Jan (and Florian).
Fri, in the morning still had some left-overs from !KaLuG-Party in the preceding night in the blood, but now more systematically with Felix we started to make contacts with exhibitors too: actually the ratio of big to small companies at linuxtag 1:4 or 1:5 quite nicely reflects the overall German situation. We hope some regional groups or events come out of this. Big thanks to Benedikt, Johann, Klaus, Joerg, Arnim and others for holding guard of the booth. Because LPI 201 was harder than I thought, I missed the intro in the afternoon's linuxtag podium on software patents but good most of the panel. There were little arguments really new for me, but it was relieving to see the head of the German patent court Melullis defending restrictions in substantive patent law ('materielles Patentrecht') against patent lawyer Axel Horns who considered them less feasible. A thing about linuxtag is that due to Karlsruhe's proximity to France and Switzerland, one can (a) have real good Alsatian flammekuechle/tartes flambees in Karlsruhe and (b) refresh Strasbourg contacts (wink to Bruno, Thierry, Jean-Marc, Marco, Sacha). The French football team lost nonetheless in the evening ... I only was briefly at the social event, and I confess, starting to feel a little cold in t-shirt when arriving by midnight, was not in the pool.
Sa, we continued contacting the booths and had some nice contacts as well, I even didn't make it to Hartmut's talks ... In the evening got home in a car with Munich gentoo user's group, a quite active Munich linux tribe. Apologies to Joerg for leaving the banner poles to him...
(On Su mailed contacts to Felix Klee who manages those, on Mo witnessed the Munich Social Democrats motion against software patents)
