At last week's DebConf 7 Debian Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, nearly 400 attendees had a chance to meet and socialise after years of working together online. They attended more than 100 talks and events, ranging from an update by the current and former Debian Project Leaders to a group trip to the Isle of Bute, off the opposite coast of the country.

The VideoLAN project, developers of the open source VLC multimedia player, is urgently seeking developers to work on the Mac OS X port. According to a posting on the VLX forums "there are now effectively zero active developers for MacOS" which has already led to the 64 bit releases of VLC for the Apple operating being put on hold.

The location and date of the annual Debian developers conference have been announced, the event will be held in Managua, Nicaragua in July 2012. In addition to a full schedule of technical, social and policy talks, DebConf provides an opportunity for developers, contributors and other interested people to meet in person and work together more closely.

Chatting to Steve Raby, UK country manager for open source ECM vendor Nuxeo yesterday, an interesting point was raised around the issue of motivation of open source developers versus developers on proprietary poducts, and hiring them.

The Debian Project again supports "newbie" and non-regular (last attended in 2007 in Scotland or before) Debian Developers or Maintainers to join the annual Debian Conference (DebConf) with a special travel fund. Mail to the DebConf Newbies Team before June 18. DebConf11 will take place in Banja Luka, in Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina from Sunday 24 to Saturday 30 July, 2011.

The DebConf organisers have announced they are now accepting proposals for contributions to this year’s annual Debian developers conference and the Debian Project has revealed the final four candidates for the 2010 Project Leader Elections

Local developers are helping to drum up market buzz to boost interest and expertise in open source technology across the country. Development in the mobile arena is particularly hot at the moment, among both individuals and software houses, according to Linux user groups in Singapore.

I was honored to present my ideas about Ubuntu & Debian at Debconf 7, with a number of Ubuntu and Debian developers present, including Mark (first time I saw him in person) and DPL Sam Hocevar. There was no slide projector, so I had to read my slides, even though everyone says you shouldn’t do that… :-)

The Brazilian free software movement is in such high gear that it is almost impossible to keep up on all the new developments and projects that are happening throughout the country. Brazil is larger in size than the continental United States and has a population of almost 200 million people.