The Linux Foundation hosts a number of open source events, including a series of Open Source Summit (OSS) conferences focused on the broad open source community as a whole, often co-located with smaller conferences focused on a specific topic.

The two I try to attend are the OSS North America event and the OSS Europe conference. Last week I was at this year’s OSS EU, held in Prague.

I had been to Prague once before on holiday, in 2011, and I was eager to return to such a beautiful city.

The event was being held at the Prague Congress Centre but my hotel was some distance away. Luckily, Prague has a great public transit system so I was able to take a tram from my hotel to the venue.

The only downside is that Maps forgot to mention the nearly 100 meter vertical climb from the tram station to the event (grin). I would learn over the next few days to take the “C” metro which had a stop right next to the building.

I wasn’t speaking so I ended up spending most of my time in the Percona booth. That was fine, since I really love booth duty and being able to talk to people, but the days could be a bit long. Due to our extraordinary events manager Kyle Flanagan, the booth was directly across from the escalator up to the 2nd floor.

The view from the venue was stunning. I thought it was cool that they stuck descriptions on the glass identifying some of the landmarks you could see from the building.

There were two main things I loved about this event: many people I haven’t seen in a long time were here, and that our booth location meant that I got to see most of them.

Carol Chen is an old friend of mine who works at Red Hat. I can remember many years ago I was at a conference and she was working the ManageIQ booth. They had cool shirts, so I asked her for one. She said “What size?” and I said “Large”.

She looked me up and down and said “No, Extra Large”. She was right and I still have that shirt today.

Carol lives in Finland and was kind enough to bring me a soda they sell there called Pommac. It is made by a Danish company and is supposed to be a non-alcoholic replacement for champagne. To me it tastes slightly of apples, sort of like a milder Martinelli’s. It isn’t overly carbonated or sweet, and I liked it.

While I didn’t have much time to wander, I did make point to visit the AlmaLinux booth. benny Vasquez is amazing and I also got to me Andrew Lukoshko, both from the AlmaLinux Foundation.

I also managed only one session over the three days (despite there being some amazing speakers). My boss, Peter Farkas, did a presentation on open source and AI. He’s the main reason I came to work at Percona and I agreed with pretty much all of his points (and I’m not saying that just because there is a chance he’ll read this post).

It is weird to apply the term “open source” to LLMs, but if we are going to do it then the training data, as well as all of the software to generate the models, has to be freely available for study, modification, and distribution. Almost no models meet that bar today. That isn’t to say things like “open weight” models are bad, it is just that they aren’t “open source”.

I did manage to get a kind of “meta” picture of Peter Zaitsev taking a picture of Peter Farkas taking a selfie in front of the booth.

That evening there was a conference event but I was a little too jet-lagged to attend. Then I saw some people wandering around with cool “35 Years of Linux” enamel pins and felt I’d missed out. I was lucky in that Nicole Puopolo hooked me up with one after the event.

The second day was very much like the first, with the exception that an evening booth crawl meant for a very long day. Kyle had arranged for “cake pops” to be delivered around lunch (think cupcake on a stick) and they turned out to be a hit.

The purple ones were chocolate, flavored with blueberry, and they were my favorite.

We had a limited number of plush goats wearing black “Percona” capes, and they were a very popular piece of swag.

I also liked the socks that Adfinis was giving out since they featured a cute otter.

Having cake pops was nice because the lunches, well, they weren’t very good. Now I’ve been spoiled in that my last two conferences had great food, and I realize that it is easier to feed hundreds of people versus thousands, and I also realize that often venues will require you to work with a specific food vendor, but still.

PZ took a picture of me eating lunch and used AI to add the MariaDB logo. So now when I say my role at Percona means that I eat, sleep and breathe MariaDB, you have proof, at least, for the former.

The final day went very much like the first two. I needed to get some work done so I was a little late to the show, but I arrived just in time for the drawing Kyle had set up for an Espresso portable monitor.

I have gotten really used to plugging my work laptop into an external monitor, but it doesn’t really work for travel. A portable monitor can help with that, as they are thin, light and run off of USB-C.

The winner was Christofer Boone and I hope he is enjoying his prize.

There was a bit of a letdown after the winner was announced, as we didn’t have any other prizes, but I think next time I’ll hold back some of the premium swag (think goats) so we have a little something extra after the main drawing.

But we did have another round of cake pops.

I really enjoyed the conference, although this was the first time I was there mainly for booth duty and not to speak or take meetings. I capped it off with dinner with Carol and Kris Freedain, and got to meet Laysa Uchoa, as we enjoyed some local food.

I am not sure how many conferences I will be attending since my focus is fairly narrow these days, and if you are reading this I do hope our paths cross at one in the near future.