MINIX conference
ast
As you may know, I am now officially retired from the VU. This gives me more time to travel around the world giving talks on MINIX 3 at conferences, including EuroBSDCon in Sofia last Fall, Codemotion in Rome this past March, HAXPO in Amsterdam in May, BSDCan in Ottawa 2 weeks ago, FrOSCon in Sankt Augustin, Germany this coming August, and Devoxx in Antwerp in November). Since I no longer have a funded research group at the VU, my fantastic full-time programmers, Arun, Ben, Kees, Lionel, and Thomas, have all moved on to other jobs, but are still doing great work for the project. We now have to manage the transition to a completely volunteer-based open-source project and need you—the existing community—to help.
The project is still going strong with a new release planned in a few months. If you look at minix3.org/stats you can see that in 2014, there were 65,000 downloads of the CD-ROM image. In total, the image file has been downloaded over 650,000 times in the past 9 years. Many open-source projects would die for these numbers.
To help expand and strengthen the community, I think we should have a conference or workshop where MINIX 3 developers could get together, meet each other, and figure out where to go from here. We could pick a random date and do it in Amsterdam but it might be better to piggyback onto some other event. One possibility is EuroBSDCon on 3-4 October in Stockholm but this conflicts with the 25th SOSP conference in California and the logistics of running our own conference in Sweden would be daunting.
Another idea is to try to get a devroom at FOSDEM ’16 (see fosdem.org) which will be held in Brussels in February 2016. This would give us a place to meet at a big conference devoted to open-source software. FOSDEM lasts a whole weekend and attracts thousands of students, software developers, engineers, hackers, and others for a variety of sessions and devrooms, which are workshops for specific communities. We could have some presentations by people who have interesting things to talk about and maybe a demonstration or two. We could also talk about the way forward, which will have to depend on volunteers.
If we don’t get a devroom due to a limited number of rooms and competition from many other open-source projects, a backup plan could be to hold an event at VU University a day or so before or after FOSDEM. There are many trains between Brussels and Amsterdam every day and the trip takes about 3 hours so people attending FOSDEM could get to Amsterdam easily. If we were to do this, we would need to charge a small registration fee, probably 20 euros, to cover lunch and coffee breaks. FOSDEM is free because it has many corporate sponsors, which we don’t.
What I would like is to get a feeling for is (1) how many people would attend a 1-day event in either Brussels or Amsterdam next February and (2) who would be willing to make a presentation on some topic related to MINIX 3 (and on what). The presentations could be of different lengths, depending on how many there are and how much time the speaker needs. Also (3) what should the event focus on (talks, demos, discussions, etc.)?
Please respond by going to
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1gQLAvpJhak9vh-tQ_Ydzwo6a_gA69B9UcEYBadLbNHI/viewform?usp=send_form
and filling out the form. Please note that this is NOT a registration form or a binding commitment to speak. I’d just like to get an idea of how many attendees and speakers we might have (e.g., for determining how big a room to ask for at FOSDEM).
Thanks for your help.
Finally, unless there are a lot of objections, I’m inclined to call the mascot “Rocky Racoon” due to the alliteration and the suggestion that “Rocky” sounds spunky. It doesn’t relate to the software but neither do “Tux” or “Beastie.”
Andy Tanenbaum
Dinsdale
Jacob Adams
As you may know, I am now officially retired from the VU. This gives me more time to travel around the world giving talks on MINIX 3 at conferences, including EuroBSDCon in Sofia last Fall, Codemotion in Rome this past March, HAXPO in Amsterdam in May, BSDCan in Ottawa 2 weeks ago, FrOSCon in Sankt Augustin, Germany this coming August, and Devoxx in Antwerp in November). Since I no longer have a funded research group at the VU, my fantastic full-time programmers, Arun, Ben, Kees, Lionel, and Thomas, have all moved on to other jobs, but are still doing great work for the project. We now have to manage the transition to a completely volunteer-based open-source project and need you—the existing community—to help.
What I would like is to get a feeling for is (1) how many people would attend a 1-day event in either Brussels or Amsterdam next February and (2) who would be willing to make a presentation on some topic related to MINIX 3 (and on what). The presentations could be of different lengths, depending on how many there are and how much time the speaker needs. Also (3) what should the event focus on (talks, demos, discussions, etc.)?
I unfortunately will be unable to attend. I would, however, love to see what people plan on doing with MINIX3 so if people could publish videos or slides that would be awesome.
Finally, unless there are a lot of objections, I’m inclined to call the mascot “Rocky Racoon” due to the alliteration and the suggestion that “Rocky” sounds spunky. It doesn’t relate to the software but neither do “Tux” or “Beastie.”
Sambuc Lionel
> On 27 juin 2015, at 23:31, Jacob Adams <took...@gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
>
[...]
Best regards,
Lionel
>
> Finally, unless there are a lot of objections, I’m inclined to call the mascot “Rocky Racoon” due to the alliteration and the suggestion that “Rocky” sounds spunky. It doesn’t relate to the software but neither do “Tux” or “Beastie.”
>
> Wiki updated. I copied the old page to mascotpick.
>
> Thanks for all your work on MINIX!
>
> Jacob Adams
>
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "minix3" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to minix3+un...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Thomas Cort
Ben Gras
On Sunday, October 25, 2015 at 6:16:07 PM UTC+1, Thomas Cort wrote:
Any updates? Is it happening, and if so, when/where?
Hi TC,
You probably got AST's email about this, as it was *just* announced.
The info is here: http://www.minix3.org/conference/2016/