John Ferrell wrote in to say:

For the past several years Tux.org, an umbrella organization supporting the efforts of users groups and developers, has had a booth at FOSE (Federal Office Systems Expo). Tux.org's goal at FOSE is to help promote the use of Linux and other open source software in government. This year CapBUG was invited to help out at the TUX.org booth and I was able to represent CapBUG.

In addition to all the Linux related materials on display at the booth we had two BSD related posters on display: an OpenBSD poster and an OpenSSH poster. For swag we had the current issue of Linux Journal and CDs including Fedora Core 6, Ubuntu and FreeSBIE, the live CD based on FreeBSD 6.2. Unfortunately I did not make enough of the FreeSBIE CDs; we ran out of them on Wednesday. I think the BSD posters caught other BSD folk's attention. Several people came up to the booth to say they were BSD users. There was at least one company at FOSE that was using FreeBSD in the products. They had built a rugged wireless access point to be used with satellite communications using a Soekris single board computer and FreeBSD. It was good to hear that people are using BSD.

Hopefully CapBUG will be invited to help out again next year. If so, we can start planning early on how best to represent CapBUG and the BSDs at FOSE. There is definitely an interest in open source software, and I think we could do a lot to help promote the use of BSD.