Summarising the results of LVEE Winter 2012

Despite the cold weather, about 100 users and developers of free/open software from Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Czech Republic and Poland have participated the conference in a sport camp near Minsk. More than 20 presentations covered a wide range of topics concerning free and open source software.

Presentations were grouped in three sections by topic: tools and technologies for software development, networking and system administration, and free licenses and projects.

During the conference, solutions based on free/open software and technologies were presented. Specially noted are the automated system for control of the government tasks execution, developed in the apparatus of the Council of Ministers of Belarus, and software and hardware systems for personal cloud data storage. System administration topic was developed in automatic replication of configurations, and in version control systems for scientific publications.

Along with the LVEE tradition, a lot of attention had been paid to high load and distributed systems ranging from web projects to national high performance computing clusters. Questions of the software packages exchange between distributions and the possibility and purposefulness of using free/open BSD-based systems in workstation segment were also actively discussed. Microelectronics was presented by universal and specialised embedded ARM-based systems.

Social direction also was not ignored. A proposition to build a criterion of IT company’s social responsibility on the basis of its participation in FOSS development caused a long discussion. Also, participants have also voiced their support to the movement against ACTA trade agreement, lobbied by media companies, which had met a lot of protest actions this day in EU countries and abroad.

The audience has chosen Aleksey Cheusov’s “Software security” as the best presentation. This talk was about approaches to improve software security of the software in Unix-like systems without substantial code reworking. The author has received a memorable prize from the organisational committee and a sponsor prize from hoster.by. Also, a prize Active Technologies company was handed to Antono Vasiljev for his presentation on automated generation of bindings in GNOME project.

In the final, a special sweet prize from tortik.by, produced in favour of the first LVEE Winter, was presented.

Abstracts and presentations’ slides can be retrieved from the official web site of the conference, winter.lvee.org. Video of presentations will be available soon.

The LVEE Winter 2012 conference was supported by the following companies: SaM Solutions, Promwad, EPAM Systems, WORLD of TANKS team, Ciklum, SOURCEFABRIC, hoster.by, empathy.by и Active Technologies.

Informational and technical partners of the conference are Linux Magazine, Root@UA, IT Business Week magazines, Computer news newspaper, as far as following portals and projects: Linux.BY, IT-JOB.BY, IT-Event.Ru, USABILITY.BY, RABOTA.TUT.BY, [mega-admin], sCommunityBY, Weblancer, DEV.by, IT.TUT.BY, UkrDev, SMS-assistent, TECHlabs, SEF.BY and ePoint System.