Wow.

FOMS and Linux.conf.au 2007 absolutely rocked the house. I go to my fair share of conferences each year, and even though I’m mostly a Mac OS X user these days, I can heartily say that there really is nothing that matches the flair, co-operation and vibrance of the Linux community.

The Foundations of Open Media Software mini-conference and workshop took place the week before Linux.conf.au to discuss problem areas in open-source media software and how to tackle them, and a number of worthy goals came out of it. One really important project is the advancement of totally free multimedia codecs that sites such as Wikipedia can use for their video: we’re gunning for Theora (video) and Vorbis (audio) support out-of-the-box for Firefox 3, which means that everyone will finally be able to watch video in a Web browser in a non-patented, totally open format without installing plugins or any other nonsense. Putting all the faces to names and seeing all the different projects co-operating to improve open-source multimedia and hit common goals is fantastic.

Linux.conf.au was just as stellar: the atmosphere was vibrant, talks were casual and informative, the organisation was the best I’ve ever seen for any conference, the parties were great, and the community just wonderful. Kathy Sierra’s keynote about Creating Passionate Users was the best keynote I’d ever seen at a conference, even rivalling Steve Jobs’s famous reality distortion field (and Kathy’s was arguably better, since she was actually delivering a ton of information rather than just unveiling “ooo shiny iPhone!”). As jdub would say, awesome. Thanks so much to the amazing Seven Team for organising the best conference I’ve ever been to, all the volunteers and helpers that made it go so smoothly, the A/V team that preserved the talks for all eternity (plug: including mine, of course :-).

Now to catch up on these 700+ RSS articles that I’ve abandoned reading for the week and await the return of life to normality. See you all at FOMS and Linux.conf.au next year!