Stuttgart: GUADEC Day 1

I swear this heat is just makin’ me want to blog … haha … It’s been well into the 90’s (F obviously) since I arrived … thunderstorms are in the forecast for tonight … yeah baby!! BTW - more pictures are up on my gallery.

GUADEC started this morning bright and early at 8:30am. A few of the board members talked and there was a great presentation as well complete with stick figures and an “R” rating … haha …

I got a chance to sit in on Keith Packard’s talk about what’s up at Freedesktop.org. He started the talk off by offering up hosting through the freedesktop.org project and also mentioned that they have complimentary hosting at MIT so they have physical redundancy. He also talked quite a bit about where he thinks freedesktop.org is headed and where it has been. Good stuff.

I also got a chance to go to Ralph Giles talk on the Xiph project and it’s progress over the last couple of years. We’ve been hosting Xiph for quite some time and it was actually a great chance to get to know what they’ve been up to. I was really impressed with the work that Ralph and the Xiph Foundation has been up to.

Finally, I got to go to Miguel de Icaza’s keynote about the current state of GNOME, Mono and a bunch of other stuff. He originally put up a presentation entitled “Pictures of People I Hate” which was of course a joke but it was funny none-the-less … haha … The keynote was right after lunch so folks were pretty comatose … that said, Miguel was his ever-energetic self.

He made some great comments about the state of GNOME. He made some comments about how the GNOME developers and what they should be focusing on. Instead of trying to get everything perfect or re-inventing the wheel, he said focus on the user and get the code working … we can make it perfect later. Good stuff. He also mentioned that GNOME needs to find a way to embrace ISV’s and get more developers connected to the project. Trying to do everything yourself is rough at best; the more devs you have, the easier it is. That comment really blew me away.

Miguel also did some demos of new software that is really helping make GNOME a great solution. One application was F-Spot. He proceeded to show a bunch of pictures of Nat Friedman doing a bunch of crazy stuff … haha … I guess whenever he gets the chance to rip on Nat he does … heh … too funny.

This is my first real interaction with the GNOME community and I have to say I love the energy around the group. They almost remind me of the Perl or Python hackers you see at OSCON (don’t take that personally - its a compliment really).