I am currently sitting in the main auditorium of the Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre (which I continuously abbreviate to "JRSL" in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Produced by a group of volunteers from various LUGs around Argentina, I was invited to participate by my very good friend, Daniel Coletti of CaFeLug. This conference will be going on during the days of August 20th to 22nd, 2008.

While DebConf and Debian Day were focused on the Debian distribution as well as Free Software, JRSL as a three-day event is about the breath and width of Free Software. CentOS, for example, is next on the list of talks that will be given.

The event is being held at a University, to keep down costs, with the side effect that no money can be paid, or even donated, for anything. Therefore not only are the talks gratis, but the CD-ROMs, banners and other things at the stands in the lobby are also gratis, and all this cost (and there are always costs) are borne by the sponsor companies.

Most of the talks are in Spanish, but the organizers have arranged for simultaneous translations (yet more costs) for the non-Spanish talks.

For those people in the Buenos Aires area, the pointer to the program is here and for those people who can not be here, the talks in two auditoriums are being streamed.

Finally, my old friend Rik Van Riel, from Red Hat, will be giving the final talk of JRSL on Friday. Rik was born in the Netherlands, worked for Connectiva in Brazil (where I met him) and is now living about ten miles from my house in New Hampshire....but we never seem to see each other except when we are at conferences. So almost half-way around the world Rik and I will be able to meet and share a good Argentinian beef dinner.....a truly small world.

Warmest regards,

maddog