We went to the DORS/CLUC Conference 2018

This year DORS/CLUC conference was the 25th edition of the conference which is started back in 1993. There was no public internet back then, and it all started on the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER) in Zagreb, Croatia.

DORS/CLUC is a legendary conference, as it goes started many many years ago  as mentioned earlier. The venue was not chosen randomly either, FER is the hub of Computer Science in Croatia, so it makes sense to use it as the venue for such an important conference.

This year, the conference was not so big, just a couple of hundred FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) enthusiasts, students, and professionals who use FOSS regularly in their work and everyday life. After attending FOSDEM, every FOSS conference looks small, but there were still some very interesting lectures.

One of our favorite lectures was from Igor Ljubuncic who talked about the triple 50 problem, which means that by the year 2050 there will be more than 50% people older than 50. Such increase in senior population means we should be creating technology that senior people can easily use as well. Today, a seventy or eighty year old cannot use smartphones efficiently, as the technology progressed too rapidly for them. He also mentions a TGGT (The Grandma Gentoo Test) – if put your grandma in front of a PC and give her a USB stick with Gentoo Linux installer, what are the odds that she will successfully install it.

There were also some odd lectures, such as the one from Henne Vogelsang, Distributing Free Software: Herding Cats, who explained why Linux software distribution dependencies system sucks big time. While we kind of agree with him, we think the example he used was not the best. He was explaining a process where he was installing a collab for a client where he ran into all kind of strange situations during the process, and made a lot of strange decisions which lead him into 20 hour struggle. We can all agree that sometimes, in a very strange combination of software or services you’re looking to install, you might have issues with the Linux software distribution dependencies system, however, it’s really not that common.

There were a lot of other interesting topics as well, such as the one from Mario Goljak and Ante Jurjević about using and installing Wazuh with Puppet, or the one from Luka Blaškovića about NIX, or Mario Splivalo talking about Juju and Mass. You can find the whole schedule form this edition of DORS/CLUC here.

Video recording of DORS/CLUC 2018 can be found here . We really enjoyed watching it again, and we hope we’ll see you on DORS/CLUC next year too.