What is OSDC.fr?

This Open Source Developers Conference (OSDC) aims to be a place for meetings and exchanges between developers from different communities, which too often ignore or distrust each other. The goal is to go beyond trolls and see what we can learn from each other. Similar conferences have been organized in several parts of the world: http://www.osdcon.org/

For the first conference of this kind in France, we'd like to begin by bringing together communities that do innovative open source programming using free/libre languages such as Perl, Python, Ruby...

The goal is to learn by seeing what others are doing. Many concepts and techniques are not tied to a specific language.

We of course welcome many other languages and technologies, particularly the most innovative or specialized, such as Erlang, Haskell, OCaml, Smalltalk, Scala, Groovy, etc.

So this conference mainly targets developers and advanced users of free and open source software. The idea is to be able to talk tech without fear of not being understood.

An important note: OSDC.fr, which has initially been founded around the 3 French user groups of Perl, Python, and Ruby (Smalltalk User Group joined in 2010), does not aim to merge the conferences of each language's community. The idea is to launch a new series of conferences, open to all open source developers as a place to exchange information.

The advantage of OSDC.fr is that it is a place to present these kinds of inter-language talks in a neutral setting, outside of the specific context of a particular language community.

(Of course, as many may already suspect, all this is just an excuse to go drinking with a bunch of geeks ;-)