From mid to late June credativ attended 3 consecutive conferences in Asia. The Open Source Summit Japan, the LC3 China and the PG Open China.

Open Source Summit Japan

As in the previous year, the Open Source Summit Japan was held again at the Ariake Conference Center on Odaiba, in the Bay of Tokyo. In order to cover the increasing number of participants, the event area was extended by several rooms. Accordingly, there was plenty of space for everyone.

In addition to a large number of technical presentations, mainly on containers, cloud and applications for automotive, there were also business and strategy orientated talks. All visitors could find topics of interest for themselves.

Specifically the presentation “Is There an Open Source Business Model: YES or NO?” by Jeffrey Borek (IBM) and Stephen Walli (Microsoft), deserves special mention, as it was the starting point for extensive discussions that day. Jeffrey and Stephen each gave their views and then gave the floor to the attendees to mix ask questions or give comments. The title being worded as it is doesn’t really explain the topic in detail. What the talk really was about is the question if a Open Source business model exists for large software companies.

Further to be emphasized is the presentation by our CEO Dr. Michael Meskes, whose question ”Is There a Future for Open SourceLC3 China

LC3 China (LinuxCon + ContainerCon + CloudOpen) was held in Beijing at the China National Convention Center. In the immediate vicinity of the Olympic Green Olympia Park, which was built for the 2008 Olympic Games.

Most of the presentations were held in English, although the vast majority of those attending were from China. A very welcoming gesture that definitely contributed to the international character. A large number of lectures with technical and business topics were held over the 4 days. Particularly interesting were the so called “office hours” as a separate position on the schedule. For this, 3 tables were provided at which discussions within the community could take place.

On the whole, LC3 seemed to be a platform for China’s largest IT companies, but it also showed that hacker groups and student groups have their own place in the community. We were certainly very happy to be able to participate and are looking forward to the next year.

PG Open China

Postgres’ growing success and the well-attended PostgreSQL^® conferences, which have been held in China since 2015, led to the first PG Open China being held at the Hotel Nikko New Century Beijing this year.

The aim of this conference was to provide a starting point for the Chinese PostgreSQL community and strenghthen its connection to the global PostgreSQL community

. For or this purpose, an international committee was established consisting of Bruce Momjian, Joshua D. Drake, Oleg Bartunov, Ray Feng and Dr. Michael Meskes.

After introducing this committee in a keynote, the event rooms were used for presentations and talks from the Chinese community. Joshua D. Drake and Oleg Bartunov also held a presentation. All lectures were translated with the help of an interpreter, so that all those present with less understanding of the English language nuances could comprehend everything.

The number of visitors of the PG Open China fortunately exceeded expectations and as such that the growth potential can clearly be seen. Especially with the focus on connection to the international community, the conference will certainly grow significantly over the next few years. It is therefore highly probable that we will be back on site next year. We were very happy to be one of the fist to participate in the PG Open China.

Last weekend, DebCamp, which is the pre-event of the largest Debian conference worldwide – DebConf, started.

This years DebConf will take place in Taiwan from July 29th to August 05th.

After we already took part in this years MiniDebConf in Hamburg, we are now also going to visit Taiwan to attend the DebConf, also because credativ is sponsoring the event this year.

Even if the flights last 16 hours on average, the anticipation of the colleagues is already great and we are very curious what the event has in store for its visitors.

Lectures, Talks and BoFs

Meanwhile the packed lecture program has been published. There will be around 90 presentations in 3 tracks on the following 8 topics:

Debian blends
Cloud and containers
Debian in science
Embedded
Packaging, policy, and Debian infrastructure
Security
Social context
Systems administration, automation and orchestration

Many of the presentations can even be streamed. The links are as follows:

We are especially looking forward to the SPI BoF (Software in the Public Interest – Birds of a Feather) and the DSA BoF (Debian System Administrators – Birds of a Feather), in which our colleague and Debian sysadmin Martin Zobel-Helas participates.

Job Fair

For us at credativ, the Job Fair is of particular importance. Here we meet potential new colleagues and hopefully many visitors interested in our company. If you want to have a chat with our colleagues: Noël, Sven and Martin will be available for you at the Job Fair and on all other days of the event.

In addition to exciting discussions, we of course hope for one or two interesting applications that we will receive afterwards.

The Job Fair takes place one day before DebConf18, on 28 July.

Daytrip and other events

Of course there will also be the “Daytrip” this year, which will show the conference visitors the surroundings and the country. Participants have a whole range of options to choose from. Whether you want to explore the city, go hiking, or hold a Taiwanese tea ceremony, there should be something for everyone.

In addition to the daily breakfast, lunch, coffee break and dinner, there will be a cheese-and-wine party on Monday 30 August and a conference dinner on Thursday 2 August. Our colleagues will attend both events and hopefully have some interesting conversations.

Debian and credativ

The free operating system Debian is one of the most popular Linux distributions and has thousands of users worldwide.

Besides Martin Zobel-Helas, the credativ employs many members of the Debian project. Also our managing director, Dr. Michael Meskes, was actively involved in Debian even before credativ GmbH (1999) was founded. This also resulted in a close and long-standing bond with the Debian project and the community for credativ.

This article was originally written by Philip Haas.

Debian 9 “Stretch”, the latest version of Debian, is about to be released and after a full-freeze on February 5th everyone is trying its best to fix the last bugs that are left.

Upon entering the final phase of development in February the test version was “frozen” so that no more packages could be added or removed without the approval of the release team.

However, Stretch has some bugs left, which need to be resolved until the release date, especially the so called release critical bugs (RC). For this purpose, numerous Debian developers host worldwide meet ups.

These meet ups are a long standing tradition and are lovingly called “Bug Squashing Party”. Despite the cute name, these events usually turn out to be one the most focused, intense and hard working days in the life cycle of a new Debian version. Pressured by the upcoming release date, everyone gets together to get rid of the nasty release critical bugs and focus on unfinished packages.

This weekend, from the 17th to the 19th of March, the Debian developers from credativ are hosting a Bug Squashing Party in the German Open Source Support Center in Mönchengladbach.

The Open Source Support Center employs the likely biggest number of European Debian developers in one place. Therefore credativ GmbH is providing the location and technical infrastructure for everyone who decided to join the Bug Squashing Party.

We hope that this year’s meeting is going to be as successful as in the previous years. Developers from all neighbouring countries took part in past events and some even found their future employer.

Coordinating the event are: Martin Zobel-Helas “zobel” (Debian system administrator) and Alexander Wirt “formorer” (Debian Quality Assurance).

If you would like to participate, feel free to sign up!

We are looking forward to your visit.

Here is the announcement on the mailing-list:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2017/02/msg00006.html

Here is the entry in the Debian wiki:

https://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2017/03/de/credativ

This article was originally written by Philip Haas.