[GRASS-de] LinuxTag 2004

[Jens Oberender]

Hi all

On the 23. to 26. June 2004 there will be the LinuxTag in Karlsruhe/Germany, the largest fair and conference about "Linux and free software" in Europe. The slogan is "Where com meets org", therefore a lot of big and small companies and several community projects are represented. The conferences consist of a wide spectrum of different topics, where everybody findes several interesting ones.

German address:
http://www.linuxtag.org/2004/linuxtag.html
English translation:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://www.linuxtag.org/2004/index.html

I think this would be a good place to me for the "Open Source GIS Community" too.
On the QGIS channel I suggested it to the other developers there and three (with me) of the europeans will come to the LinuxTag. It'll be nice for getting to know each other better, talk about interesting stuff and ideas and certainly heavy hacking.

As QGIS has a plugin for opening GRASS stuff now and we want more GRASS integration in the future we thought we could bring the idea of a "Open Source GIS Community" meeting also to the GRASS people, as a lot of the main developers (Markus, Radim and the guys of Intevation) and users are from Europe or even Germany and it therefore would be easy for them to attend.
Intevation will have a booth there (they had also the last years) afaik.

Any interest?

About my experiences with LinuxTag:
2002 I were there only for one day, joined some lectures and looked at the different booths.
2003 I were with a friend for two days. He works on php so we mainly were at there booth, we got to know the guys there, had some coding sessions (I helped the guys of DBDesigner4 to build a RPM for there project) and were invited to some beer in the evening, after the LinuxTag, at a need beer garden. The beer was sponsored by MySQL (who was also there). It was a nice evening and we went to bed late, at the stadion of the University, in sleeping bags. On the next day we also joined some lectures and looked at different projects.

Beside the congress center is a big park which also contains a zoo, so for relaxing you can go out, lay on the grass, have lunch there or program on a laptop. WLAN is available in the fair and the conference area and perhaps in some parts of the garden too.

Is there now any interest on meeting there?

Ciao,
	Jens