Open Source conference in Argentina draws a crowd

PEOPLE OFTEN associate Argentina with Tango, and perhaps Patagonia and live penguins. But times are changing and as the CaFeCONF conference showed, the penguin OS is not only alive and kicking, but also has a huge following down under.

Sponsored by international heavyweights as Red Hat and Intel alongside local outsourcing firms Globant and Tecso, the sixth yearly edition of the Linux and Open Source conference -once again perfectly organised by the Buenos Aires Linux Users Group, CaFeLUG was held at Argentina's capital.

UADE's building, and the conference hall

The organisers say it's been a success, jumping from 500 to 600 visitors in the first two editions to an average of 1,400 to 1,600 people in the last three years. And I believe them. Leandro Monk from CaFeLUG, general coordinator of the event said that this year there were two thousand registrations to the conference, which lasts two days. This event is totally free, it must be noted.

Top: The "Orange T-Shirt Guys" (CAFELUG members). Bottom: auditorium

Hundreds of notebook-bearing techies descended on the UADE university near the Obelisco -a 221 feet tall obelisk and one of the landmarks in Buenos Aires- which let CaFeLUG use two floors of the comfortable building. Which makes sense, since CaFeLUG's own logo is GardeTux, the familiar Linux mascot sporting a tango hat and a bandoneon, with the Obelisk behind him.

Despite horrible weather outside during the first day, visitors were able to choose among 30 keynotes with topics as varied as "an introduction to GNU/Linux " to techie topics like "Configuring IPTables", "web programming with Python", "Xen virtualisation", "Solaris containers", or an introduction to the powerful yet only hacker-friendly Perl language. There was a heavy emphasis on making subjects accessible to the non-techies as well, specially the education sector, with keynotes on Wikipedia, "Remote Learning using Open Source Software", " Building effective Presentations" and "Programming for the OLPC", among dozens of others.

Top: Packed Corridors with geeks bearing notebooks. Bottom: full classroom

watching a keynote.

The programme was so packed that many visitors had a hard time trying to choose what keynote to attend. I for one decided to start with a keynote on Red Hat's "Global File System", about which you will read more in a following story. In the main hall were booths by the main sponsors: Intel promoting its dual core and quad core CPUs - with an unbranded notebook and leaflets about its quad-core Xeon processors, Red Hat with a booth promoting Fedora, and Globant promoting its services.

Also in the same floor were tables with representatives of the different user groups and organisations... from the local Python users group to other FOSS software advocacy organizations like Solar, Via Libre and the soon-to-be-official local chapter of the WikiMedia.

As one of the sponsors, Chipzilla used the opportunity to sell its multi-core wares

This conference also made this scribbler realise that for the last few years I've been digging for open source news at the wrong place: it's not Expocomm where the OSS news are, it's definitely CAFECONF.

I was able to meet plenty of techies, finally associate faces with familiar e-mail addresses, and even extract a handful of stories for the world to see that you will read about here. The conclusion? These yearly conferences are a must for any Spanish-speaking techie and computer geek down in South America, so book yourself a visit if you plan to visit this part of the world next year. µ