Meetings and Events
At NYCBSDCon 2007, a talk titled "BSD is Dying" took the world by storm. Two years later at DCBSDCon 2009, we got the follow-up "BSD is (Still) Dying." A year later, "BSD Needs Books" was presented at NYCBSDCon 2010, followed up with "BSD Breaking Barriers" at NYCBSDCon 2014.
These excellent presentations fall into what I call "BSD advocacy for everyone" talks. That is, talks that can get anyone excited about joining the *BSD community and fully bringing themselves and their skills and gifts to our little piece of human history. But the most recent of the talks above is a decade old at this point. What should a "BSD advocacy for everyone" talk look like in 2024? How ought we communicate the value of the software and ourselves to the broader world today?
Come with me on an exciting journey on how I wrangled the proprietary Oracle Developer Studio and Intel oneAPI DPC++/C++ compilers to run on FreeBSD and NetBSD and output native binaries for those operating systems. This journey is interesting to our question of "*BSD advocacy for everyone" by highlighting the power of the BSDs, the flexibility to undertake and excel at any task you might throw at them, and how many of the perceived problems those on the outside might feel "hold us back" are social, not technical, in nature, and how we can lead in turning the tide on outsiders' thinking in myriads of easy and small, large, and in-between ways.
This talk will leave you with more than a few laughs, insights on "porting" proprietary software to the BSDs, and energized to be a *BSD advocate in your communities.
Brian has been around the BSD community since 2005, NYCBUG since 2010, and got his OpenBSD account in 2013; he primarily works on OpenBSD ports. In 2014, he moved to Troy, NY, where he has lived ever since. He still does not appreciate the harsh upstate NY winters. Brian is the Graduate Program Director for and a Senior Lecturer in the Information Technology & Web Science program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the Founder and Director of the Rensselaer Cybersecurity Collaboratory, the cybersecurity research lab and nationally leading CTF team at RPI.