OSC2013

A few weeks ago I attended the OSC2013/Fall in Tokyo. OSC stands for Open Source Conference, and it's a popular Japanese event for lovers of the Open Source movement. To give you an idea, it's similar to Europe's FOSDEM, although smaller in size.

Among the talks I went to, I specially liked these two:

• MIST32: I was very impressed by the speakers of this talk. They have built an open source 32bit CPU called MIST32 on an Altera FPGA, and the corresponding Toolchain.
• FlashAir: this was a talk for encouraging developers to write applications for FlashAir. FlashAir is an SDCard with an embedded wi-fi web server. The web server has a CGI-based interface by which you can manage the files stored in the SDCard remotely. Lucky enough, I got a card in a lottery after the talk.

Apart from the talks, OSC always reserves space for booths were groups of people and companies show their stuff. Among the booths I saw, I got specially interested into these two:

• Tokyo Hackers Space: Hackerspaces are community-operated physical places, where people can meet and work on their projects. I must say that soon after OSC2013, I became a member of Tokyo's hackers space!.
• Koedo Linux Users' Group: a group of Tokyo Linux users who publish their own magazine and organize meetings regularly.
• Firefox OS: I could finally touch by myself a smartphone equipped with Firefox OS. They told me that the Keon model can work in Japan with a Docomo SIM card.

Finally, I must mention the LT (Lightning Talks) that put an end to the event. Japanese LTs are a lot of fun. Most of them are spiced up with humor and crazy stuff. This year the LTs had a special guest, 高野 麻里佳 (Marika), a very cute voice actress.