At Bootlin, we owe a lot to the Free Software community, and we’re doing our best to give back as much as we can.
For some of our upcoming public training sessions about embedded Linux, Linux kernel driver development or Yocto Project / OpenEmbedded, we decided to offer a free seat to one deserving contributor to the community.
Each seat has a commercial value between 1,690 and 2,090 € (including materials, embedded board, lunch and laptop rental). The winner will even walk away with the embedded hardware used during the practical labs (Beaglebone Black board or Atmel SAMA5D3 Xplained board).
Conditions to benefit from this offer
- You must have made visible contributions to the Free Software community, through any project: documentation, code, support in mailing lists, participation to local user groups, Free Software advocacy…
- You need to be available at the next session (if needed, by taking vacation days) and be ready to travel to the training location at your own expense.
- Professionals are also welcome (as long as they are contributors). There is no problem if they belong to a company who could have paid for their session. No problem if they do this on their working time, and if their company pays for their expenses.
- You will need to familiar enough with English, to understand the training materials and the oral explanations.
- If you are interested in one of the above sessions, you should send a mail before the deadline (see the above blog posts for details) to award@bootlin.com, summarizing your contributions to the community and your motivations and letting us know which session(s) you are interested in. We will only use your e-mail address for this particular offer.
- People who already participated in the selection but didn’t win are welcome again. They just have to let us know that they available at the next session and wish to try again.
- People are allowed to apply to multiple sessions at the same time.
- A committee of Bootlin engineers will elect the “best” candidate, in terms of past contributions and the potential for further contributions thanks to the training session, and will notify the person by the specified date.
Why you should take your chance
- Even if you do have experience in this topic, you will be pretty likely to learn something new. This will also be an opportunity to ask questions and share your own experience with other embedded system or kernel developers. See testimonials from participants to our sessions.
- The session can be done during your working time, if your boss agrees. No need to take days off.
- Not so many people dare to apply, so you have a real chance to win.
- For people living in the Avignon and Toulouse areas, the cost is really zero.
- For people coming from abroad or from other regions, there is a significant number of cities where low cost flights to Marseille or Toulouse are available. Your extra expenses (typically hotel + dinner won’t exceed 100 EUR / day if you stay, as cheap hotels are available near the training venue.
Conditions for winners
- Only the training fee, materials, embedded board, lunch and laptop rental will be free of charge. Traveling to the venue, accommodation and food (except lunch) will still be at your own charge.
- This offer may be revoked if the session is canceled because there are not enough participants. If this happens, the next session will be proposed to you.
- You will have to confirm your participation within 3 days after your election. Otherwise, we will select another winner.
- The winner is not allowed to transfer her or his seat to anyone else.
- The winner must participate to the whole training session.
Cancellation clauses
- No free seat will given if we do not receive any sufficiently interesting submission.
- Our ability to offer a free seat in our training sessions depends on the availability of seats. If two weeks before the session starts, our session is very likely to be fully sold, we will have to postpone the draw to a later session, until we have free seats left again.
If you are interested in our public sessions and what to be sure to have your seat, you can also ask your company to register you. 
Past winners
Philippe Lhardy (session in Toulouse, Jun. 2011)
- President of the Linux Azur association, promoting the use of Free Software on the French Riviera, organizing local conferences, install parties and other local events.
David Wagner (session in Nice, May 2010)
- Contributed to a Gnome/Debian distribution running on the OpenMoko Freerunner phone.
- President of the Free Software association in his engineering school.
- Participating to Free Software events and member of the organization team for some of them.
Thanks to meeting him in our session, David later got an internship at Bootlin, working on NAND flash and UBI/UBIFS.
Laurent Guerby (session in Toulouse, Oct. 2009)
- Founder and main admin of the GCC Compile Farm project as volunteer for FSF France
- Minor contributor to GCC, mainly to Ada support
- Member of many free software associations, currently APRIL/AFUL/FFII and Toulibre/Linux Tarn.
- Money donator to the FSF France for the past 7 years