Despite a few hiccups in the live streaming and recording efforts at FOSDEM 2015, 402 talks were successfully recorded, 94 of which popped up in the video archives this week. The archives also include recordings from past FOSDEMs (all the way back to 2005), so when you discover that you've been sitting at your computer for a few days, watching videos and tripping down memory lane, don't say I didn't warn you.

Here are a few of the many 2015 videos you might want to check out:

• Foreman: Contributing to Foreman (where and how)

• CentOS: Community Build Service and Infrastructure

• CentOS Infra Revealed

• Retooling Fedora: Retrospective on Fedora 21 (and looking to 22)

• CentOS Storage SIG and GLusterFS

FOSDEM organizers are still editing and posting videos, so keep an eye on the 2015 video folder or check the STATUS text file for additions.

The best deals are those in which both parties come out of the arrangement substantially better off than they would have been otherwise. One of the most significant aspects of Red Hat's business model is that it represents a mutually beneficial deal between two overlapping groups of people: one that sees the Red Hat model as a powerful way to turn freely available open source software into a compelling subscriber experience, and one that sees it as a way to turn the subscription revenue received from satisfied customers into freely available open source software.

Neither of those groups is more important to Red Hat than the other. The interaction and collaboration between them helped build the company into an organization able to go head to head with much larger competitors. I think the most interesting aspect of this business model is that it is not inherently limited to the organizations we traditionally think of as software companies, or even those we consider to be technology companies. Rather, the model potentially applies to any organization that invests in software development or customization for their own use or on behalf of their clients.

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SCALE13x starts tomorrow in Los Angeles, but you can find out more about many of the speakers by reading interviews on the event blog, including:

Interview with Rikki Endsley - Confessions of a Reluctant Tweeter: Social Media for Open Source Projects, Friday at 3:45

Interview with Gina Likins - How to Thoroughly Insult and Offend People in Your Open Source Communities, Friday at 1:15

Interview with Matthew Miller - Fedora.next: Bringing Change to a Classic Distro (without too much kicking and screaming), Sunday at 4:30

Interview with Levente Kurusa - Linux Desktop: When Is Our Year?, Saturday at 6:00

Interview with Tom Callaway - Understanding FOSS Licenses (without a lawyer), Saturday at 6:00

Interview with Brian Proffitt - Why Scale Up is Like Star Trek and Scale Out is Like Star Wars, Saturday at 3:00

Interview with Joe Brockmeier - Solving the Package Problem (or Making It Infinitely Worse?), Saturday at 1:30

Interview with Rich Bowen - Intro to OpenStack, Saturday at 11:30

When we aren't in sessions or speaking, you'll find us in the hallway tracks and in the expo hall. See you in sunny Los Angeles!

More than 100 nominations were narrowed down to 10 finalists for the Women in Open Source Award. Voting is open until March 6th and the winners will be announced at the Red Hat Summit in June.

Awards will be given in two categories, Community and Academic. The finalists for the Community Award are:

• Shauna Gordon-McKeon, program director at OpenHatch
• Elizabeth K. Joseph, systems engineer at HP
• Deb Nicholson, community outreach director at MediaGoblin
• Karen Sandler, executive director at the Software Freedom Conservancy
• Sarah Sharp, embedded software architect at Intel

And in the Academic Award category:

• Charul, Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad
• Sophia D’Antoine, student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (studying Computer Science and Computer System’s Engineering, Bachelor’s and Master’s degree)
• Emily Dunham, Oregon State University (studying computer science)
• Netha Hussain, Government Medical College, Kozhikode, University of Calicut (earning a Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery)
• Kesha Shah, student at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (earning a Bachelor of Tech (B. Tech) in Information and Communication Technology)

Visit the Women in Open Source Award page to learn more about the finalists and to cast your votes.

(And good luck to all the finalists in this inspiring group of women!)

Next week in Los Angeles, I'll be giving a talk at the SCALE 13x conference on oVirt's new OptaPlanner-powered scheduling adviser.

Martin Sivák wrote a great post about the feature a couple of months ago, but didn't cover its installation process, which still has a few rough edges.

Read on to learn how to install the optimizer, and start applying fancy probabilistic fu to your oVirt VM launches and migrations.

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Yesterday, Eoghan Glynn led a Hangout to discuss the work around rebooting the OpenStack Ceilometer project, using the new approaches of the Gnocci project.

As you may remember, we talked about some of these ideas back in July in a podcast with Eoghan, and a lot of progress has been made toward those goals since then.

In the hangout, Eoghan talks about the Gnocci work, and how it restructures Ceilometer's internal data store, and provides a more lightweight API for retrieving current and historical data about your OpenStack implementation. Gnocci attempts to correct what is seen as a design misstep in the early days of Ceilometer, in which a great deal of static, or almost-static, data, is included in each data sample, resulting in poor performance and more storage space usage than necessary.

You can watch the hangout on YouTube and bring your questions to the rdo-list mailing list or to the #rdo channel on the Freenode IRC network.

If you wanted to attend DevConf.cz in Brno this week, but couldn't make it there in person, you're in luck. The event is live streaming from some of the sessions, and video archives are available on the RedHatCzech YouTube channel.

The event started today and runs until Sunday afternoon, and the schedule includes lots of tech talks focused on our upstream projects. Tim Burke's opening keynote and a few other talks are already online:

Delivering OpenSource Projects using Agile & DevOps Thinking, by Jen Krieger

Federated Identity Providers – the Ipsilon Project, by Simon Sorce

Using OS-level identity, authentication, and access control for Web applications, by Joe Brockmeier

As you walk down the crowded, narrow Rue des Bouchers on any given Brussels evening, you may find yourself assailed by restaurant barkers intent on getting you to swing into their establishment and dine on their fare. It's not exactly a welcoming gesture, particularly when some of the barkers embrace the situation and just tell you flat out they want your money.

This past weekend, five kilometers to the south at the Université libre de Bruxelles, other crowded, narrow pathways were full of folks promoting a different sort of fare: free and open source software. If you don't like crowds, FOSDEM would definitely a place to not be –except for the fact that so much goes on there. Far from unwelcoming, the sense of excitement and camaraderie at this annual event makes it a much more positive environment than similar events within FLOSS.

To describe FOSDEM to the newcomer is at once easy and frustrating –"big" certainly covers it, but doesn't communicate the scope of an event that spans this small university in the heart of Brussels. The sheer variety of sessions alone are enough to feed the appetite of the most voracious FLOSS advocate.

oVirt certainly had its share of sessions in the conference program. From Gerrit to Gluster to smart VM scheduling, members of the oVirt community were out in force, educating attendees on the latest work being done in our project, as well as the tools and techniques we use to improve our process flow.

oVirt was also fortunate enough to have a booth in the event's exhibition hall, smack-dab in-between the OpenStack and Puppet stands. Working alongside the OpenStack community folks was fun, given that many people tend to conflate the use cases for our two projects. But the proximity of our booths enabled us to explain to the many visitors who attended when and why would would want to use oVirt, and when an OpenStack solution like RDO would be a better fit.

Yes, free software projects do find themselves competing for mindshare and resources at times, but unlike the barkers of Rue des Bouchers, we're not going to do it at the expense of the user's wallet or valuable time. If a particular tool or platform works better for someone, we'd rather they use that happily instead of being unhappy with our offerings.

That doesn't mean we're not going to try to improve our own project, though. Self-awareness of problems and the self-discipline to improve them – these are the keys to open source and free software projects' success. Not slick marketing and empty promises.

That's never fare you should see at FOSDEM.

Follow the oVirt community on Twitter at @oVirt.

The Satellite team spent the first parts of February meeting and working with users of their upstream projects Foreman and Katello.

We started the week in Brussels at FOSDEM. As a first time attendee, I was impressed with how many passionate open source developers were at this conference. Danial Lobato (@eLobatoss) gave talks on how developers could contribute to Foreman, and then showed how to use Katello and Foreman together to manage and deploy Docker containers. Petr Chalupa (@pitr_ch) discussed improvements in concurrent-ruby based on his work in Foreman.

The real action was in the central hall. The team commandeered some booth space and spent two days meeting with users. They answered questions, showed future features, and helped to debug issues in running systems. The team topped off the two days with a community dinner at Drug Opera in the lower town. The community discussed things ranging from UI improvements to strategies to tie pony tails with only one hand.

The team then moved on to Ghent, to attend Config Management Camp. This is a two-day conference that brings users and developers of configuration management tools from around the world. Foreman was the third most requested room, and it was busy the whole weekend. Ohad Levy (@ohadlevy) organized two great days of talks in the Foreman room. After two days, we were glad to be heading home, but energized by such a strong community.

Foreman: Join the Foreman community on the project website, the mailing lists foreman-users and foreman-dev, or on IRC at #theForeman or #theForeman-dev.

Katello: Learn more about Katello at the project website or the mailing lists and IRC channels for Foreman.

FOSDEM is over, but a bunch of us are still in Europe this week for Infrastructure.Next, which is going on today in Ghent, and DevConf.cz in Brno this weekend. Planning ahead for later this month, you'll find a bunch of us in sunny Los Angeles for the Thirteenth Annual Southern California Linux Expo (a.k.a., SCALE13x). You'll see us on the expo floor, at the Infrastructure.Next event, and giving lots of talks:

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