FOSS4G has been an awesome conference. Its fantastic to get the opportunity to meet so many other open source developers and users, sharing ideas, stories and experiences, especially if you usually work or study in an environment that is hostile towards open source. Aside from the opportunity to meet so many other like minded developers, the conference was a showcase for Lausanne, Unil Sorge and Switzerland. Take a look at these photos:
They are taken in a public area in the University at Lausanne. There are clusters of I-Macs dotted all over the place, to allow students or conference delegates to check their email and browse the Internet as they wish. Resources like this are almost unimaginable in the UK – the only place I have ever seen Macs at UCL is in the Architecture department. Senate House library has a few really dirty old Windows machines lying around to check email on – not quite the same as banks of I-Macs.
To augment the free I-Macs, the University of Lausanne has a free (like speech) Wi-Fi network – no WPA, WEP, VPN or any of that rubbish, just log on and go. This is symptomatic of Lausanne’s embracing of open source, and makes me wonder why UCL have such a locked down network (WEP and VPN). Perhaps a bright salesman from Cisco (who supply the VPN client that everyone must use) convinced the holder of the purse strings?
Back in Switzerland it gets better – take a look at this photo that shows a room full of high spec PCs, with flat screen panels and a projector that everyone can see. Every part of this room reeks of a well designed space. Its dimensions facilitate around 30 students, with everyone able to see and hear the demonstrator. Sorry to pick on UCL, but do they have any facilities that get close to this? In four years I have never seen any. What’s more, each one of the machines is running Linux, a Gentoo distro booted off a live CD. And every single one of the machines worked (because Linux works).
So the retort is that these are exceptional facilities that have been laid on for the conference to impress and embarras attendess from less developed nations like the UK. Well, I have been reliably informed by a friend who went to the University in Lausanne that facilities like these are always available. There were at least four rooms with banks of PCs like these, suggesting that there are plenty of resources to go around in Switzerland. What is going wrong in the UK? Why do I have to pay £3500 for a Masters degree to be taught on 5 year old computers, when in Switzerland, my peers who will ultimately be competing with me in the same European job market, have facilities like these? For £500 a year by the way. The only hint of disorganisation/brokenness came at Geneva airport at the EasyJet check-on area. EasyJet have adopted a self check in system – passengers use a touch screen terminal to print their own luggage tags, then queu to pass the bags to the EasyJet ground staff. The idea is a good one. The implementation is very poor. First, the space is appallingly designed; people queuing to print their tags are intercepted by people queuing to hand over their bags, which leads to chaos. So that was the disorganisation, what about the brokenness. Well, that came from good old Bill:
heh, what do you expect, you have to PAY the police people that harrass other people drinking beer outside a pub. no monies are left for the cool toys