COVER STORY GUADEC 2007

The 2007 Gnome Users and Developers Conference GUADEC GATHERING More than 400 Gnome users and developers gathered in the United tracks covering the state of the art, short- term goals, and some of the sexier ideas Kingdom for the July 2007 GUADEC conference. for potential inclusion in Gnome 3/ 4 [3]. Conference sessions covered diverse top- BY PAUL ADAMS ics such as legal issues, Mono develop- ment, and the intriguingly titled “ UADEC, the annual Gnome users pursued with vigor. The KDE project is Foo.” Additionally, keynote speeches and developers conference, is trongly focused on this year’s release of were presented by Ari Jaaksi (Nokia), Gone of the larger project gather- version 4, so most people at the confer- Alex Gravely, Rob Love (Google), Stormy ings on the calendar [1]. This ence appreciated his point. Peters (Open Logic), and Doc Searls year’s gathering in , UK, In their keynote, (Linux Journal). was no different. More than 400 people and Bryan Clark () offered a sug- were in attendance, from all aspects of gestion for the focus – closer integration A Real Community the Gnome community. between the desktop and the web – Between talks, attendees could be found A general buzz of excitement at the which was something reminiscent of Mi- talking in the corridors. Unlike many Birmingham Conservatoire focused on crosoft policy circa 1998. However, de- other conferences, the focus of GUADEC some early talks about the selection of spite correctly pointing out that applica- is to bring all corners of the desktop Gnome and its applications for the Open tion developers are losing users to the community together in an effort to drive Moko phone and the Nokia 770 and 800 on-line application space, many develop- the community – not just the product – mobile tablets, and as the desktop of ers questioned the logic of integrating further. As a result, ad hoc meetings of choice for Canonical’s Ubuntu desktop applications with third-party, users and developers were conducted distribution. on-line systems, such as Google’s Gmail. wherever space could be found. Further- Havoc and Bryan’s demo of [2] more, there was seldom an IDE in sight, Moving Ahead gave a clear indication of how desktops but attendees still managed to use the Gnome should not be complacent with may work in the future. But even the 20GB bandwidth provide by the ISP by it successes, warned LUG Radio’s Jono promise of having user data available day three. Bacon in his humorous and rabble-rous- from any machine, anywhere, couldn’t The feeling of community integration ing opening keynote. He asserted that win over all attendees. was fostered by the conference’s two so- the project requires “specific, defined This year’s program of more than 90 cial events. The events gave hackers and direction" and that direction should be hour-long sessions was delivered in users alike an opportunity to mix outside of the venue and discuss all things Gnome over a few beers. Looking Forward After the bustle of the main conference, GUADEC concluded with two days of “after hours” meetings. The focus of these sessions was on helping develop- ers pick up new skills, bringing the con- ference to a gentle conclusion while also maintaining excitement for new direc- tions in Gnome. And the community should be excited – next year’s meeting is in . ■

INFO [1] GUADEC website: http:// www. . org/ [2] Mugshot website: http:// www. mugshot. org/ [3] GUADEC talks: Figure 1: GUADEC attendees in their natural environment, the LUG Radio party. http:// www. guadec. org/ schedule/ core/

92 ISSUE 83 OCTOBER 2007 WWW.LINUX - MAGAZINE.COM