2004.09_Guadec-Gnome Developers' Conference Report.pdf

COMMUNITY

Guadec 2004, Kristiansand

end, but the real excitement began

on the Monday morning as every-

one arrived to register and greetings

were exchanged and introductions made.

The welcome session included the

mayor and the vice-chancellor of the

university, and then a now-traditional

session of everyone present having to

introduce themselves briefly. “I hack on

Gtk” “I read bug reports” “I work with

Skolelinux” “I am hoping to learn about

Gnome” “I translate Gnome” “I work on

Abiword”.

The list went on and on. Guadec grows

every year, but this seemed the most

international yet. From the introductions

it was also clear we had a lot of people

from projects which were separate from

Gnome, here to find out how their pro-

jects and Gnome might help each other.

A Wider Reach

The fifth Guadec, or Gnome User And Developer European Conference, was

held in Norway, in late June 2004 [1]. Some three hundred and fifty people

were at the Agder University College campus at Kristiansand. As ever, I was one

of them. BY TELSA GWYNNE

There were a lot of discussions about

legal issues, particularly on the third day

of the conference, a day on which the

keynote was delivered by Dr Edgar Vil-

lanueva, who had a great deal to say

about free software’s value worldwide

and the importance of a truly global

sharing of information. The importance

of legal and political issues was empha-

sized by the Norwegian minister for

transport and communications, who told

the audience that they should be lobby-

ing their national representatives who sit

on the World Summit on the Information

Society. I don’t think I ever expected to

be told it was time to start lobbying the

United Nations.

themselves to each other and conversa-

tions continued.

A few things stood out to me at this

Guadec in particular. The wider reach

was one. Not only did we have people

from everyone continent except Antarc-

tica present, we had people from lots of

different projects. There were people

looking at sound architectures for X as a

whole; people who were there primarily

for the Skolelinux discussions; and

enough Gimpers for an entire Gimp con-

ference to go on at the same time.

A Lot To Do

It was impossible to get to every talk.

There were three tracks going on simul-

taneously at times. Fortunately, I got to

quite a few. For a lot of people, half the

point of the conference is not the talks

themselves, but the chance to meet up

with people. People they know and work

with over the net, in order to discuss

things face to face. People they have

never met before, where the conversa-

tion can be on anything, from who had

the most disaster-filled trip there, to a

sudden bright joint idea which requires

an immediate trip to the hacking room or

the whipping out of a laptop to try some-

thing new and exciting. Lots of code was

being written outside the talks. From the

number of laptops inside the talks, I sus-

pect a fair amount was being written

inside, too.

Announcements at

Guadec ranged from the

GPL’ing of HelixPlayer

by Real to the release of

Mono 1.0. A talk about

translation technologies

raised the offer of mak-

ing some of Sun’s tools

available freely, and a

BOF (birds-of-a-feather,

a small discussion ses-

sion) about bug triage

discussed whether Nov-

ell’s testcase database

would help Gnome.

Real Life

One of the best things for me about this

Guadec was hearing about the people

who were using Gnome and free soft-

ware generally because it was filling a

need for people. It was being used by

groups in Africa, because it is legal to

pass it around and make copies without

worrying about license fees and piracy. It

has been used by so many different

groups in the public and non-profit sec-

tors that in the wrap-up session one

person specifically mentioned that it

would make sense for those groups to

work together rather than to provide sev-

eral slightly different ways to do it.

It is available in many different lan-

guages, and if it is not available in a

particular language, all it takes is a single

native speaker to get the ball rolling.

This conference was a reminder that no

longer are we working on something that

one day might help to change the world:

it is already something that has started to

help change the world now.

Evening Talks

In the evenings, the conference didn’t

stop. The talks stopped, but events at the

bar had been arranged. It had taken

most people about half an hour to dis-

cover the price of drinks in Norway, and

so any free or cheap beer was immedi-

ately popular. More knots of people

formed and more people introduced

■

INFO

Figure 1: Guadec speakers and organizers with Dr. Edgar Villanueva (2nd left).

[1] GUADEC 2004: http://2004.guadec.org/

September 2004

www.linux-magazine.com

Gnome User And Developer European Conference 2004

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