Hello,
We would like to share with you some experience we've had in the beginning of February while visiting FOSDEM 2020 event in Brussels.
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Free and Open-source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) is an annual non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open-source software development. Started in 2001, FOSDEM is one of the top open-source events on the planet, usually gathering more than 8,000 participants. Thousands of open source developers from all over the world are flocking to Brussels to collaborate and mutually exchange their ideas and experience.
Most of the talks are given in the so-called “developer rooms” (devrooms) - conference halls where teams can meet and showcase their projects. For the last 19 years devrooms of FOSDEM are a traditional place for teams to publicly share news and present the latest achievements, hold discussions, give lightning talks and of course, hack a code.
Open Cascade representatives for the first time attended FOSDEM this year and it was 100 percent worth it. Author Malyshev senior software developer, one of the main contributors, author of tutorials and certified trainer on Open CASCADE Technology (OCCT) presented the success story of perhaps the only open source full-scale 3D geometry library available since 1999.
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Author Malyshev, who was given a very warm intro by the moderators, presented in the Open Source Computer-Aided Modeling and Design devroom the keynotes of OCCT, within the talk he gave an overview of the technology itself, its licensing policy, evolution and also covered several interesting topics like modeling data, algorithms, visualization, and data exchange. After the speech, Author was asked a lot of questions by the audience, and warm communication with interested people continued even long after the end of all the speeches.
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In the frames of the same devroom many other like-minded open source projects were also presented including such well-known names as FreeCAD, KiCad, CadQuery, Gmsh, which successfully utilize various Open CASCADE Technology capabilities. This room was so popular among developers that all the seats were occupied all the time, and many people just stood in the aisles, and moreover, to get into the room, they had to take a queue half an hour before the start of the desired performance. Fortunately, for those who failed to listen to speakers, all the performances were recorded by the team of organizers.
You can download and watch videos wth all talks (including Open Cascade one) that were held in this particular dev-room via link https://video.fosdem.org/2020/H.2213/
Two days at FOSDEM 2020 had gone for Open Cascade representatives with the speed of the light. Not only the tech conference, but also the exhibition of projects was very fruitful. Open Cascade made a lot of new friends and finally met in person the old ones. OCCT got a huge amount of useful feedback that has yet to be digested.
Please share with us your thoughts about this event and your suggestions about participation in similar ones!
