2009 Annual International Debian Conference finished successfully

August 6th, 2009

About 250 people from over 35 countries attended this year's Debian conference, DebConf9, which took place from July 24th to 30th in Cáceres, Extremadura, Spain. About 80 of them also attended the Debian working camp, DebCamp, which preceded the conference from July 16th to 23rd. DebCamp is mostly used for face to face meetings by teams within Debian, but also by groups of Debian contributors working on ad-hoc projects that require closer collaboration.

Thanks to strong sponsorship from HP, Junta de Extremadura, Telefonica, Linux Magazine, Google, Collabora, Canonical, Qt, maemo.org, Comparex, Intel, Ayuntamiento de Cáceres and others, the conference's catering, facilities, accommodation as well as abundant computing power were free of charge to all early registrants and inexpensive to other attendees. Additionally, this allowed many active Debian contributors from both inside and outside Europe to receive travel subsidies to make their attendance possible. The Junta de Extremadura's support in planning and organising the conference helped to make the event go smoothly and leave a professional and hospitable impression.

Much like the Debian project itself, the conference organisation team consists only of volunteers. The combination of their hard work and support from the sponsors helped DebConf9 to be highly productive, achieving several seminal results. Debian Project Leader Steve McIntyre concluded: This has been one of the most productive conferences we have ever held. Our developers and teams achieved a great deal during this short period, and this will surely have a big impact on the upcoming release of Squeeze.

Among the many notable talks were the release team's keynote, presenting the release goals and further plans for Debian GNU/Linux 6.0 Squeeze as well as the new timed freezes release policy, and the Project Leader's keynote, which prompted discussions about motivating the project's developer base in the future to work further towards Debian's motto of being the universal operating system.

In all, over 130 different sessions took place during the conference, ranging from formal talks to numerous spontaneously scheduled meetings. For most of these sessions, live video streams were made available over the internet. This allowed participation of non attending Debian contributors, who could additionally participate in discussions via special chat channels. As with recordings of previous Debian conferences, the videos will be made public at debconf9.debconf.org/video once they have been processed and edited.

The next Debian Conference will take place in 2010 in New York City, USA. The DebConf website contains much more information about DebConf, as well as several pictures from this year's conference.

About Debian

Debian GNU/Linux is a free computer operating system. Over three thousand volunteers from all over the world work together to create and maintain Debian software. Translated into 27 languages, and supporting a huge range of computer types, Debian calls itself the universal operating system.

About DebConf

DebConf is the Debian Project's developer conference. 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. It has taken place annually since 2000 in locations as varied as Canada, Finland, and Mexico.

Contact Information

For further information, please visit the DebConf web pages at https://www.debconf.org/ or send mail to <press@debconf.org>.