Richard Stallman, the initiator of free software movement (full bio here) will speak in Switzerland TWICE next Monday, the morning in Lausanne, the afternoon in Geneva.

Lausanne (UNIL)
When: Monday 18th June; 10:00-12:00
Where: University of Lausanne, Anthropole, Auditoire 1129

Abstract: Richard Stallman will speak about the goals and philosophy of the Free Software Movement, and the status and history the GNU operating system, which in combination with the kernel Linux is now used by tens of millions of users world-wide.

No registration needed. Link

Geneva (CERN)
When: Monday 18th June; 17:00-18:00
Where: CERN Council Chamber
Topic: Ethics and Practice of Free Software

Participation is open to all and free of charge. Contact Miguel.Marquina(at)cern.ch to arrange access to CERN.

The monthly great conference from the CERN:

Speaker: Paul Strong, eBay Research Labs

Title: Delivering eBay’s Virtual Economy – The Problems Solved And The Challenges Ahead

Time and Place: Wednesday 2 May, 14:00-15:00, CERN Council Chamber

Abstract: eBay’s infrastructure is perhaps atypical of those of today’s enterprises, but is typical of what many enterprise infrastructures will need to become in the future: The combination of a platform, a Grid, comprised of vast numbers of networked commodity, and notionally cheap components, delivering a more or less continuously available set of massively distributed web services. In the case of eBay these resolve to a virtual economy. This presentation will describe how eBay evolved and created this massively horizontally scaling infrastructure, delivering high quality of service and business agility, what the challenges are that arise from this success and how these are being addressed.

Participation is open to all and free of charge. To register for an
access card to CERN, please contact francois.grey@cern.ch.

Steve Wosniak is coming to Tweakfest in May (among other speakers like Jeffrey Huang, John Buckman or Herbert W. Franke. Full program here)!

Tweakfest will be an amazing mix of art shows, talks, networking, and much more. Patrick Hofer and his team are creating a wonderful event in Zurich, and the trend of holding cheap conferences in one of the world’s most expensive country continues: the ticket is only 95CHF.

Save your seat now

If you are interested in weird conference formats, check out the ignite Seattle videos. Speakers have a short amount of time (I believe it’s 5 minutes) and their slides are rolling automatically behind them, one every 15 seconds.

Compte rendu du débat Nouvo et LIFT avec Pierre Chappaz, Stefana Broadbent et Claude Monnier.

“tous les médias coexistent et qu’il n’y a jamais de substitution”. Autrement dit, les sites internet personnalisables ne tueront pas les médias classiques. Par contre, ceux-ci sont redéfinis. “Par exemple, la télévision tend de plus en plus à devenir un média d’arrière-plan, elle reste allumée comme la radio et on lui jette un coup d’oeil de temps à autre dans un pic d’attention. Les journaux – à l’exception des gratuits – requièrent au contraire toute l’attention.”

Lien (et vidéo)

Marc Fleury, Founder of JBoss, will present about “Making a Business out of Open Source” at the CERN this coming Monday. This guy is quite a funny and disruptive character (he once referred to the Apache crowd as a bunch of fat ladies drinking tea among other things) who built a company despite heavy skepticism about open source in the early days of the movement.

I really wish I could be there on Monday but I will still be in Seoul. Anyway, feel free to contact François Grey on francois.grey@cern.ch if you wish to attend (free).

Practical details below:

Speaker: Marc Fleury, Founder of JBoss

Topic: Making a Business out of Open Source

Time and Place: Monday 16th April 14:00-15:00, CERN Council Chamber

Abstract: Marc Fleury, a physicist by training, retired in his thirties after selling the company JBoss, which made an open-source application server, to Red Hat. He will talk about the various business models of open source software. From leveraging available open source software and casual contributions, to on-ramp models and subscription models, various business models have been explored and function. Not all models work for all software fields and business types. He will review those business models in context and survey “state-of-the-art” economic models for open source software production.

Speaker Bio: Marc Fleury is the creator of JBoss, an open-source Java application server.
Fleury holds a degree in mathematics and a Doctorate in physics from the École Polytechnique in Paris and a Master in Theoretical Physics from the École Normale. He worked in France for Sun Microsystems before moving to the United States where he has worked on various Java projects. Marc’s research interest focused on middleware, and he started the JBoss project in 1999, and went on to found the JBoss company with his wife Nathalie. JBoss became a corporation under the name JBoss, Inc. in 2004. After selling his company to Red Hat in 2006, Fleury became Senior Vice President and General Manager of the JBoss Division. On 9 February 2007, his departure from Red Hat was made public. He is currently pursuing other personal interests, such as teaching, research in biology, his family, and doing gigs as a techno DJ in the Atlanta area.

Bonus link: a very interesting 2005 interview of Fleury where he gives a hard look at the open source market.

LIFT et Nouvo, le magazine multimédia de tsr.ch a le plaisir de vous inviter à son débat public. Son thème: “Internet: vers une information personnalisée jusqu’à l’émiettement?”:

Internet a bouleversé le monde des médias. L’arrivée des sites personnalisables, permettant aux internautes de se construire leur page d’accueil sur mesure, est en train de modifier en profondeur la consommation d’information. Ce changement est-il positif? Est-ce la fin des “grands médias” rassembleurs? Le début d’un émiettement de l’information?

Les orateurs:

• Pierre Chappaz. Fondateur de Wikio, moteur de recherche d’informations dans les blogs et les medias et Codirecteur de Netvibes, portail personnalisable
• Stefana Broadbent. Ethnologue, travaille pour Swisscom à l’étude des nouveaux modes de consommation et de communication
• Claude Monnier. Journaliste au sein du groupe Edipresse, il a été rédacteur en chef du Journal de Genève et directeur du Temps stratégique

Venez participer au débat le mercredi 4 avril 2007 à 18h00 à la Salle Michel Soutter (entrée TSR), 20 quai Ernest-Ansermet, 1205 Genève.

L’entrée est libre mais l’inscription obligatoire. Pour vous inscrire et obtenir plus d’informations à propos du débat et des intervenants: www.nouvo.ch/debat

After Mark Shuttleworth last week, the CERN is bringing another world class speaker to Geneva: Sir Robin Saxby. If you are interested to attend, contact severine.pizzera@cern.ch and ask for a (free) badge.

Speaker: Sir Robin Saxby, Chairman of ARM and President of IET.

Time and Place: Friday 9th March 14:00-15:00, CERN Council Chamber

Title: Chips with Everything

Abstract: In this talk, Sir Robin will discuss the history of the Microchip Industry in parallel with ARM’s history, demonstrating how a small European start-up can become a world player in the IT sector. He will also present his vision of important applications and developments in the next 20 years that are likely to become even more pervasive than the mobile phone is today, and will provide anecdotes and learning points from his own experience at ARM.

See you there.

Update: Time and Place: Wednesday 28th February 14:00-15:00, CERN Council Chamber

The CERN is organizing a conference with a fascinating speaker: Mark Shuttleworth. The guy’s bio feels like a Scorcese movie:

• started as a developer on Debian (an operating system).

• founded Thawte in 1995 (a company specialised in digital certificates and Internet security), sold it to Verisign for $575 million.

• turned to business incubation and venture capitalism.

• he then formed a non-profit organization dedicated to social innovation.

• on April 2002, he became the second civilian cosmonaut.

• in 2004, he returned to the Linux world by funding the development of a user-friendly distribution of Linux, Ubuntu.

And in 2007, he will give a speech at the CERN about “Open Source Software: The Challenge Ahead”. Worth the trip probably!

This just in: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to make historic joint appearance at the fifth annual ‘D: All Things Digital’ conference.

That was the goal I had set for LIFT (as I told to Le Temps earlier this year), put both of these guys on stage for an hour to discuss the revolution they started. I guess I will have to find another goal now, Dalai Lama and Bill Clinton?

Anyway, don’t even try to register for D5, it’s sold out (and the price was a hefty 4’000$).