The second Free and Open Source Software Conference is being held this year on August 25th-26th, in St. Augustin, Germany. Some 66 speakers will address issues ranging from Drupal and other web technologies to KDE 4, Open Source and Marketing, as well as Women in IT.

Drupal is the subject of at least twelve discussions at FrOSCon this year. These discussions will include brief talks and workshops addressing installation, infrastructure, graphics, and even the Drupal 6 menu system. Drupal has 20 projects involved in Google's Summer of Code, and attendees can see how these are progressing. Other subjects include localization and using the Content Construction Kit to create flexible page layouts.

Myriam Rita Schweingruber will present her personal views on why women comprise only 4.5% of the FOSS community, especially as compared to 20% in the non-Free software community. Schweingruber seeks to explain some of the facts and offer suggestions for improving the status quo. One of the issues she is likely to discuss is whether there is a real need for special women's groups and whether there might be better ways to attract more women into the FOSS community.

One of the more interesting subjects promises to be Open Source and Marketing. Valerie Hoh, who wrote a thesis paper about using FOSS alternatives in media production, aims to help bridge the gap between FOSS developers and marketing professionals. Her discussion will focus on the idea that, while the FOSS community regards marketing as inappropriate and unnecessary - and that FOSS will naturally grow on its own - it is not always the best, but the loudest, that control the market.

PostgreSQL, Ruby, Wikis, and using live GNU/Linux CDs for administration tasks are some of the other topics being covered. There will even be a presentation on using OpenOffice.org Base. The Key Note, The Principle Freedom, will be delivered by Elmar Geese, and discusses the impact of the irreversible changes FOSS development has brought about in the IT ecology.