Capitole^W Bazar du Libre 2015

Just a quick report on Capitole du Libre, which actually didn’t happen… Well, the Toulibre team managed to turn the canceled event (due to the University administration) into a “Bazar du libre” which well, was quite different but interesting nevertheless.

[reposted blog entry, since it looks like Drupal ate the previous post…]

When I heard that the event was canceled due to what happened on November 13th, just a week before the date, I just had my car-sharing trip booked. But then they announced they would be doing something anyway, so I waited a bit before asking for a refund. We didn’t have much info yet, as you can see here with several updates as they were actually planning things.

It was clear that most of the many talks wouldn’t happen because the event would be spread between different small places. Which was a shame since both Adrien and I had an accepted talk, along with a booth… But I didn’t want to give in, so I decided to attend anyway. Besides, the new program was getting interesting, with famous people like Jérémie Zimmermann. And I didn’t have more planned expenses since Adrien had some room for me at his flat.

Saturday morning we decided to have a look at Artilect, the local Fablab, where talks where held about Inkscape, Scribus and FreeCAD. They also offered coffee and cookies which were appreciated!

After some pizza we decided to go have a look at another place where the big talks where held, Mix’Art Myrys. The place is an artist squat, which is radically different from the University where the event was originally planned, and allowed meeting a different audience. One of the talk was by Stephane Bortzmeyer, in disguise, about the Yeti project, which hosts an alternative DNS root making it possible to test many scenarios you wouldn’t even be allowed on the official root.

On Sunday we also went to Mix’Art Myrys for more talks. We also had discussions about surveillance state and how to keep our freedom online and IRL, and even a talk about philosophy. The last talk was by Hugo Roy about reverse engineering and legality, something some of us are concerned with when having to write drivers for some obscure hardware without public specifications…

In the end we didn’t talk much about Haiku, but it was an interesting event anyway, and I did pay a glass of wine to Stéphane Bortzmeyer in exchange for good Haiku PR ;-)