Eliberated !

I'm back from the Eliberatica Conference. I didn't take any photos with my camera but I can describe the post's title with this image that I took on the way back home at ~2200 freezing meters of altitude. In case you're wondering, I'm moving mountains over there.

I can't say much about the presentations since I moved around from Mozilla's booth, GSL's booth and Fedora's booth since I'm involved in these groups of interest. But be sure to check what I'm reading from Google Reader on the right side to read about the presentations.

At the Fedora booth I got a chance to see:

• Jeroen van Meeuwen in action while he was telling enthusiastically a visitor about the great things added in the upcoming version of Fedora
• Răzvan Sandu, a strong supporter of the Open Document standard
  
• Cristian Secară, who actively supports the usage of Romanian language in IT
• Eduard Moraru, a Fedora user from Iași, Romania, who would like to help the Romanian Fedora community expand there
• Ecaterina Valică from Iași, Romania, who criticized the Fedora Romanian team for standing together, but apart from the rest; we kindly shared a chair with her and some good minutes of talk and of course a Fedora Live CD
  
• Mihai Oaida, a programmer from Timișoara, Romania, my hometown, who gives a free web programming course to students from a informatics high school in Timișoara
• Strainu, member of the Romanian OpenSUSE community and a "rpm buddy" of the Fedora community
• and of course, my Fedora buddies, Nicu Buculei, Ionuț Arțăriși and Adrian Joian
  

At the Mozilla booth, I met:

• William Quiviger from Mozilla Europe and Zbigniew Braniecki aka "gandalf" from Mozilla Corporation, both really passionate about Mozilla and ready to spread the love to any visitor who was near the Mozilla booth
• my colleagues in mozilla.ro, Alina Mierluș and Irina Sandu
• Iulian Ursache Dogariu, the person that translated Firefox before me
• Anca Luca, a really active programmer and person as well, just have a look at her blog to get an idea
  
• many others interested in Mozilla's products, which were either asking about when x will be supported by a Mozilla product; some just passed by to say gladly they were using Firefox or Thunderbird, or another project

At the Romanian Free Software Teams stand, standing for GSL, I met

• Stas Sushkov, a really active person that supports the Ubuntu Team and especially the GSL group.
  
• and invited several people from various projects or that have initiatives in their part of Romania to think about joining our group (The Group for Free Software in Romania). This group was started to keep the local communities and initiatives together for a better communication and for giving a helping hand when needed.
• Alex Eftimie from ROSEdu, a Romanian organisation that brings together people passionate about programming, open source software, and IT in general
  
• Tibi Turbureanu from Ceata, a Romanian organisation that is set to free arts and modern technologies
• Marius Popa, a very cool guy from the Romanian Firebird community

In the end, it was a big accomplishment to have so many Romanian free software contributors and enthusiasts in one place, and for this I'd like to thank every Romanian that came to Bucharest a few kilometers or hundreds of kilometers like me. Pat yourself on the back for doing a good thing, you're helping free software grow in Romania.

And don't forget, at Grupul pentru Software Liber (The Group for Free Software) we have a gathering event coming up this summer, FLOSSCamp 2nd edition for which I invite you to express your interest in participating either in this blog post or on the discussion group. You can subscribe via RSS to the softwareliber.ro news feed to find out more about the event and other upcoming events organized by local communities, like Fedora, Ubuntu and Firefox release parties where you can have fun with people like you. And if you're running a community or want to start a community do let us know: http://softwareliber.ro/contact/. You can help free software grow in Romania!