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Sometimes it's hard being a European English speaker...
How time has flown! It's the 10th, and there are only 2 days left to get paper abstracts in for GUADEC 2005 (29-31 May, 2005, Stuttgart, for those who haven't been paying attention).
I would love to see a beginner-heavy conference, with lots of the API people trying to show off their wares with practical sessions - we have already got a promise of an abstract for a practical GTK# tutorial, it'd be nice to have something for glade and libglade (say with ruby or python to get something nice up & running in an hour or two) - in fact, I would love to see 4 or 5 tutorial sessions in the hack-center with real audience participation.
There will also be lots of space for poster sessions, BOFs and brainstorming sessions - the emphasis is on inclusion, and having the conference be fun and exciting. We've already planned flash talks, and will soon be opening invitations for them - so even if you only have a small thing to share, take your 2 minutes, and over-flow to a poster or BOF to discuss things in more depth.
People should leave GUADEC on a high with a big buzz saying "those guys *ROCK*, I love GNOME!" - we're not talking about appealing to the LCD, but about showing people the power of the developer platform, and the coolness of the desktop platform.
So come on in, step up to the plate, and share your passion and your experience, GUADEC is for solving the problems that are annoying you and recruiting new hackers to help.
Oh - closing date is the 12th. Abstracts, with a photo and a short bio, should go to guadec-papers@gnome.org before Wednesday night - there might be a short extension, but don't count on it.
I have been wondering recently whether Free Software communities without a *good* "benevolent dictator" eventually reach a critical mass and implode. I'm not sure, but it's a thesis worth considering - projects or user groups who get so self-involved that they lose sight of the greater world, and eventually fade out of existence.
There are a few historical examples of this, notably mailing lists and IRC channels (I remember when #linpeople on openprojects was *the* place to go for pretty much any Linux configuration problem, it is now low-level chat). This is inspired by #debian's dishonourable mention in the LinuxJournal poll in the "bad neighbour" section - the free software/open source member who walks the walk but doesn't talk the talk.
A few examples of projects that have dangerously walked the like, and eventually either pulled up their socks and re-concentrated on a high-quality user experience - not just with the application, but more importantly in community interraction - or were superceded by a group/project which did are MPlayer (still precariously attached to their old reputation) and sodipodi.
I worry sometimes that the GIMP as a project is in danger of becoming irrelevant too. In general, user's experiences in the GIMP community are negative, because of a perception that we set the friendliness bar too low, and the technical bar too high. There are lots of mailing list, IRC and bugzilla exchanges where users are expected to read lots of docs, and "inform themselves" before contributing, and often the replies are a little too curt for my liking. I love the GIMP, but sometimes it is very frustrating to see the comments that new contributers get from some people who are established.
Another thing that got me thinking about this was the recent thread on g-d-d about whether there should be an MP3 profile in SJ - I don't know what an audio profile is, and I haven't ever owned a CD recorder, so I haven't used SJ yet, but it seems obvious to me that most users want to write MP3s. Encouraging use of Oggs by making writing MP3s difficult isn't making things easy for users, who surely are the people you want to make happy... Ideally, you would (similar to other applications) make writing MP3s easy, but have writing oggs be trivial, and the default.
Does free software need to stay friendly to stay relevant, or is a barrier to entry a reasonable way to raise the SNR on community forums, freeing up developers for the "hard" questions?
I'm meandering... but it's food for thought.
I just sent a mail reminding people that the GUADEC papers submission deadline is coming up.
I think it's important for people to send in submissions, because GUADEC is pretty much where we set a direction for the project for the year (and years) to come. We want GUADEC to be the rockingest free software conference of the year, and that means having people get a vibe going - by talking about cool stuff, sucking unsuspecting bystanders into their funky world, stuff like that.
Tutorials, brainstorming sessions and BOFs, flash talks, poster sessions, we want all this stuff. The planned talks branch of GUADEC is just one bit, and it probably isn't even the most important bit.
Oh - and since there are currently fewer submissions than talk slots, we may yet have the Czech Biotechnologist Jens Würlinger giving a talk on the reproductive cycle of the Arctic tern, and how it relates to biohasard propagation (I think he sent the paper to the wrong address, but you never know).
So unless you want to hear Jens talk about terns for 3 hours, get your ideas in soon!
The problem is that the operation destroys a bunch of user data, and this is one of those situations where we assume that the user knows what they're doing. The GIF plug-in saves what you give it.
We could have an option in the GIF plug-in, have it on by default, and optimise the image as an export operation when someone saves a multi-layer image as GIF, I suppose. But if the user wants to keep all the info, we're not going to tell him he can't (we can also unoptimise animated GIFs, by the way). That would need a bugzilla number then...
2 years ago, the GIMP was #3 in the weekly bug report, with somewhere around 500 open bugs. Let's see how many there are today.
When we dropped out of the top 15 8 months ago, number 15 had 108 open bugs - now it's 133. Hmmm...
Congratulations to reknowned author Robert M. Love for becoming the first person to send an abstract for GUADEC 2005!
Waiting patiently for the others now...
Someone pointed out on IRC that in this occasional series of blog entries, that I had not yet mentioned Spain (except for a comment in passing). So I thought it might be a good idea to correct that.
For those who don't know, while GUADEC 4 in Dublin was being organised, the education authorities of two of the poorest regions in Spain, Extramadura and Andalucia (where the spaghetti westerns were made) made the brave and historic decision to install computers with GNU/Linux and GNOME on 40,000 computers (servicing 80,000 students) in schools in the regions. The local government also produced 150,000 installation disks for anyone who wanted one. There are plans to extend the project to 240,000 people over time.
Think about those numbers for a second.
The project had two stated goals, and these were their principal reasons for choosing Free Software:
The junta has also created dozens of telecenters where people as old as 99 have learned how to use the internet, send e-mail and type letters on a computer - making GNOME a platform which really is software for everybody.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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