Department of Computer Science

Review of FrOSCon 2023

Tuesday 15 August 2023

The 18th FrOSCon took place on the campus of the Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg (H-BRS), University of Applied Sciences, on 5 and 6 August 2023 and was a great success despite the partly very wet weather. After last year, due to the Corona pandemic, only about 750 participants could be counted, this year about 1,300 visitors took part in the conference.

The first chair of FrOSCon Andreas Kupfer, together with his deputy Hinrikus Wolf and the Vice Dean of the Department of Computer Science (H-BRS) Prof. Dr. Matthias Bertram, opened the two-day conference, which offered a great programme with 80 talks, 12 workshops, 17 stands of project partners and 27 projects.

Among the guests was the founding father of FrOSCon, Dr Sayeed Klewitz-Hommelsen. He is proud that the conference continues with so much commitment and exciting topics even after his retirement from the Department of Computer Science at the H-BRS. After 18 years, the FrOSCon conference has grown into one of the largest conferences on the topics of Free Software and Open Source in Germany.

Prof. Dr. Marco Winzker, Vice President for Studies, Teaching and Continuing Education at the H-BRS, also pointed out in his opening speech how important it is to be able to advance innovative and flexible digitisation solutions by means of free software and open source and gave the floor to the first keynote speaker, Bianca Kastl, who addressed the topic "Without open source? How would that have worked?" and reported on a path to digitisation in the administration.

This year the focus was on the topics:

Finally the full desktop experience - Malware on Linux
Open windows! A fresh breeze for the corridors of public authorities - Open Source in public administration
Running up that hill - Funding for Open Source in these difficult times.
I'm sorry Dave I can't do that. - The impact of Large Language Models
That sounds good! - Audio under Linux