I’ve had the chance to attend the FOSTEL (Free Software/Open Source Telephony) summit last week.
It was a very interesting conference, gathering lots of different projects.
There were people involved in VOIP, protocols, PBx, IM, collaborative applications, porting Linux to various devices (including phones/smarphones, PDAs).
I can’t remember everything, but here are some bits for the record :
Some of the interesting talks I remember is the one of Sean Moss-Pulz from FIC about OpenMoko and the FIC Neo1973. Very interesting ideas like some viral transmission/flashing of phones OS via some phone holding images 😉 Besides the joke, he explained that many companies seem interested in managing the software stack deployed on a fleet of mobile devices inside the company, kinda custom distro for employees phones ? That may make sense, and explain interest of some for libre software phone stacks. All components in OpenMoko will be libre software, and the only part left proprietary should be the GSM driver stuff : guess what, operators/carriers don’t seem to want you and mess with the GSM protocols 😉
Interesting info : the Telenor operator and partners (including Trolltech) apparently want to provide free/gratis access to their GSM network for libre software developers ! Very valuable contribution indeed. More details at the places mentioned in Knut Yrvin’s slides.
We’ve been discussing new user interfaces in a BOF, also, which gave me the oportunity to talk about Internet rabbits (nabaztag/tag) as new kind of devices using new user interface models (RFID tags, voice recognition, etc.). Funny that these folks were not really aware of that wonderful toy.
I will try and update this post when I get pointers to new interesting presentation slides.