Monthly Archives: July 2009

Back from Gran Canaria

So many things happened during the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit that it’s impossible to summarize them all, but here’s a list of the ones that come to my mind now:

  • Alfredo Kraus auditorium is a great venue, and its location couldn’t be better.
  • The University was less spectacular, but from a functional point of view I think it was more suited to this kind of conference than the auditorium (to begin with, Internet connection worked better). Its main problems: distance to the city center and lack of places to have lunch.
  • When Jos van den Oever said: we not only share specifications, we also share code, and everyone in the room started to applaud.
  • Despite that, and at least for me due to the packed schedule, I couldn’t attend any of the KDE talks. I don’t know if other people had the same feeling, but I left Gran Canaria a bit skeptical about the actual usefulness of having both conferences together.
  • All keynotes were good.
  • Moblin 2 looks promising.
  • GNOME Shell, Zeitgeist, Clutter, WebkitGTK+, client side windows.
  • The hacking sessions at the hotel lobby.
  • Nokia’s announcement that Maemo will switch away from GTK+. While this is a complex decision with a lot of causes (probably some of them political and some of them technical), I think it’s fair to say that this is (at least party) a failure of GNOME/GTK+, and deserves some debate inside the GNOME community.
  • Few women giving talks. I hope there comes a day when the number of women in free software conferences is not a matter of mention.
  • The weather was too hot for me (although at night it was fantastic).
  • The beach at night.
  • Canarian food at the dinner with the GNOME Hispano team.
  • Fernando and Xan’s GNOME 1, 2, 3 show.
  • The GNOME band.
  • Kimmo using a whiteboard for his talk.