Mathieu Blondel

I attended to the first day of the FOSDEM conference on last saturday. This was the first time I attended such a conference so it was great to see all this crowd, the overall atmosphere and all the bearded geeks ;-) The talks I followed were quite interesting even if the impression I have is that it is generally difficult for great developers to be good speakers.

The first two talks, that probably everyone attended to, were about software patents in Europe and the OLPC (one laptop per child) project. While this is an interesting and challenging project technically speaking, one can wonder if a laptop is really the thing that children from Africa need most at present…

On the afternoon, I attended to Keith Packard’s talk on X.org, Linux BIOS talk and Andrew Morton’s talk on the Linux Kernel. I found the talk on Linux BIOS very technical and difficult to catch. On the contrary, the Linux Kernel talk was more qualitative, in the sense that the technical parts have not been very detailed.

Andrew Morton said something interesting about the kernel contributors. He said that a vast majority of them are professionals that are paid to work full time on the kernel. And the few contributors that are individuals do not remain private very long anyway. This quite cuts the idea that many people have that free software is made by passionates in their garage… He also explained why some companies care about paying kernel developers. It was quite interesting.

The French magazine Le Point establishes a ranking of the best engineering schools in France every year. There is one ranking for the post-preparatory classes schools and another one for the post-high school schools. This year, my school Telecom Lille 1 (formerly ENIC) is ranked 3^rd in the latter ranking.

Several criteria have been taken into account such as the number of students per teacher, the budget of research, the time required to find one’s first job, the first salary, the order of magnitude of management classes, to name just a few.

The tuition fee is also taken into account. Telecom Lille 1’s is 880 € a year which compared to American or Japanese universities is nothing but compared to some other French public engineering schools is too much in my opinion. Students with a scholarship from the government only have to pay 440 € though.

All in all this is very good news for Telecom Lille 1!