Stuttgart: GUADEC Day 2

GUADEC Day 2 has brought some (much needed) rain with it … it’s cool finally in this beautiful city … haha … I guess the rain is making me lippy … this is a long post … sorry …

Couple of good talks today. I went to see Mark Shuttleworth give a talk about “all things open source”. Mark did a cool thing (IMHO) and had a slideshow of his trip to space running on his laptop instead of OpenOffice slides. Then he just free-form talked about what he’s up to and where he see open source heading in general in the next 10 to 20 years.

Bear in mind I’m just paraphrasing what he said:

* Open source is just the start. It could have been open architecture or open engineering but we just happened to have the first tools for decent collaboration; email, diff and patch. As the end-user tools mature, we’ll see more people and areas of expertise move to an “open” way of doing business.

* The future of the desktop will be open source. It’s just a matter of time. Just like they said Linux would never make it into the data center, it has and the desktop will follow. The key to this is simplicity, elegance and usability.

* Ubuntu was created to help speed the development of a desktop environment that anybody could use. In addition, it’s around to help enable collaboration umong many, many different projects. The goal is not to be a single uber company but to build an ecosystem of small companies (ISV’s if you will) that can help support and grow the community from a grassroots level.

I can’t do his talk justice. Feel free to watch it yourself.

Speaking of usability, there was a great talk that some Novell product folks put on about usuability of Linux from a Windows user perspective.

Usability has been a big theme at this conference so far (although the debate rages over what exactly that entails). There was a great talk that some Novell product folks put on about a study they have almost completed regarding Linux usability from a Windows user perspective.

Anna Dirks and Peter Goodall (the Novell folks) set about creating a usability station which they would take across the globe and do short, 30 minute usability tests with “average” users. They tested both KDE 3.2 and GNOME 2.6 and asked users to do a few “tasks” (not to confused with tests - its the software getting tested, not the user) under these desktops. The results were essentially that there is a lot of work to be done.

The best part was that the usability station they have has cameras that watch the users face, hands and computer screen all in real-time multiplexed into one 4-way split screen. It’s amazing how frustrated users can get trying to do things on a computer. More and more focus is being placed on usability and it’s going to have an impact on the bottom line of deployed Linux desktops in the years to come. If anything, their talk was great just to see some techniques for doing usability testing.

The next talk I attended was the “Project TOPAZ” or “GNOME 3.0″ (ToPaZ == Three Point Zero) which was done by Jeff Waugh. Jeff is a great speaker; he’s funny, engaging and doesn’t really need all that many bullet points to get his meaning across. My favorite piece was the “10×10″ initiative that he proposed; 10% of the desktop market running GNOME by 2010. It’s a daunting task but one that is attainable. I was impressed to see folks nod their heads when he offered this up and he was really pushing hard on the more-than-just-maintenance-releases mentality.

Again, I’m not doing his talk justice; watch it yourself.

The rest of the day was in ad-hoc sessions and a hackfest headed up by Nat Friedman. Not being a GNOME hacker I decided to head back to the hotel and catch up on email.

All-in-all it was a good day. I’m really impressed with the GNOME community but that is the subject for another blog entry.