Journées Du Logiciel Libre in Lyon

Seven months ago I had the chance to attend JDLL, a really nice French speaking FLOSS conference that occurs every year since 1998 in Lyon. It was my fifth attendance (I went in 2010, 2011, 2014, and 2016) so I already knew what to expect, but it grew a fair bit since my first one. Back then it was only two talk tracks, one workshop track and a dozen of booth, now they are at five tracks, one or two workshops at the same time depending on the time of the day, and a sports hall full of booths.

Speaking of booths, given the strong GNOME contributor presence in Lyon we have had a table there for a long time. Bastien took care of coordinating, registered for us and arranged for the event box to be shipped. We were four volunteers and took turns sitting behind the table and answering questions from visitors. The audience is quite different from most FLOSS conferences and many barely know what Linux is, so the most common question was what GNOME was.

Another difference from the usual conference is that there is a strong connection to other ethical concerns that are dear to the heart of many FLOSS enthusiasts. Not too far from ours was a booth for a worker union (targeted at people working in the software industry). Vegetarian friendly food was available. Some of the articles for sale here and there were pay what you want. The main theme for that edition (visible in some of the talks) was sustainable development.

I spent most of Saturday behind the booth and it was not too busy. In contrast Sunday was a packed day. The venue was opening at 10:30. We showed up, set up, and not too long after that it was already noon and time to have lunch. Adrien and I held a newcomer workshop at 13:00. We had three attendees and while we were not able to get them to the point of running an app they built themselves because of network issues, we managed to give them an extensive tour of the workflow, Builder and Gitlab. Hopefully they had everything they needed to get started by the end of the hour.

Right as the workshop ended at 14:00 we headed to another room where Adrien gave a talk showcasing the work done to get GNOME applications to work well on the Librem 5. At 15:00 I gave a talk about Matrix where I told people how awesome it is and why they should switch to it. Both talks were well attended and well received.

So why is that report being published so long after the event? Well our talks were recorded and we were told the videos would be available soon, so I wrote the draft for this post and waited for the videos, then I forgot about it, and I just found out that the organizers recently managed to publish the recordings. You can find the video of my talk along with the slides on the dedicated page. Adrien’s is available here.

And if you fancy trying out Fractal, a Matrix client for the GNOME desktop, you can install it by clicking on the following button.