Here we are

We are pleased to announce that Igalia will be sponsoring the GNOME party during Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, tomorrow Monday, at a nice terrace close to the leisure harbour of Las Palmas.

Some useful tips:

• Starting time: Monday, 6th of July, 21:30
• Location: Club Sotavento, Terraza Budweiser, Muelle Deportivo (close to the place where Nokia’s party will take place today). Google map: http://tinyurl.com/my6d4w
• How to get there: either walking (~25-30 minutes from Las Canteras) or by taxi (~4 Euros)
• Drinks and some food will be served

The popular Ice cream Death Match will take place there, and we are trying to see if we can arrange some music instruments to improvise a jam session. Stay tuned.

Please, share this information with the rest of the GNOME lovers/users/developers/supporters.

We hope to see you there!

I finally got some time to talk about my recent trip to Évora for the Open aLANtejo 2007. The conference was as great as I expected after my previous experience two years ago, with a wonderful organization by the people at the NEEI and really interesting talks, all of them related to open source.

The first day I talked about FLOSS business models and our experience at Igalia. I tried hard to avoid a commercial presentation and I focused on the main challenges for doing sustainable development of innovative free software from small companies; the goal was to motivate students and professionals to start free software companies in Portugal. Quite a lot of people got interested and I kept talking about this topic during the rest of the weekend with both students from the university and people managing small open source companies.

On Saturday, I presented Gnome Mobile and Maemo, going from a more theoretical part about what is going on in the Gnome mobile sphere to the details of the specific projects and the ways one can contribute to them. The talk got even more interest than the previous one; at the end of the presentation, quite a lot of people came to see the N800 and to ask about ways to start developing new applications for Maemo or using this kind of devices for their specific (business) purpose. Really nice to have this kind of feedback; one feels that the level of coolness of all the ‘mobile’ side of Gnome is really very high.

The conference was also nice cause it allowed me to meet cool people like Flávio Glock, Isaac Clerencia, Erica Brescia, Daniel Liszka, Daniel López or Jono Bacon who were also invited speakers.

I look forward to going to the beautiful city of Évora again in the near future, and I advise everyone to not hesitate if you get an invitation for this conference.

Berto has announced his nice last.fm player for Maemo. It is GPL, stable, you can listen to your favorite radio, and the binary is less than 50k. No excuse for not using it.

This weekend I will be in the beautiful city of Évora, for a new edition of the Open aLANtejo, the first one entirely dedicated to open source. The conference is one of the biggest IT events in Portugal and I had a great time there two years ago, when I was invited to give a talk about Gnome and to take part in a classical KDE vs. Gnome round table.

This year I was again kindly invited to give two talks: the first one, on Friday afternoon, about business models and sustainable free software development, taking Igalia as case study; and the second one, on Saturday afternoon, about the use of free software for mobile devices, discussing in detail GMAE, Gnome Mobile and Maemo.

The conference program looks very attractive, and I am looking forward to being there.

By the end of this week we will start the first edition of the Master on Free Software, organized in A Coruña by the Social Program of Caixanova, the University “Rey Juan Carlos” (URJC) and Igalia. Caixanova will provide the facilities and do the management, and the people at the Libresoft group of URJC and ourselves at Igalia will be in charge of the contents and teaching.

The Master is a one-year-long course targeted to people with software engineering (or similar) background that want to specialize on free software. Our experience shows that it is often the case that engineers have good general skills on software design and development but lack the specific knowledge needed to contribute to the free software ecosystem. All the teaching, with a very practical approach, will try to reduce that problem.

Of course, Gnome, Freedesktop, Gnome Mobile and Maemo will have a key role inside the course, and will be used as main case studies.

We also will have the collaboration from key people inside the community, like Miguel de Icaza, Richard Stallman, Carlos Guerreiro or Bdale Garbee among others, who will be involved in the adivising committee of the Master and will give seminars on subjects like Mono, the free software moviment, software patents, Maemo or Debian.

Some companies, like Sun Microsystems or Telefónica I+D are also contributing, giving some seminars and/or taking some o the students for an internship by the end of the course. New companies can still get involved: please, drop me a line if you are interested.

All the teaching material (written in English) is expected to be published with a free license.

This first year we will start with a very reduced amount of students, trying to keep the quality standards high, and setting the bases for consolidation during the next years.

I will try to keep sharing this teaching experience, closely related to the Gnome project, as the course evolves.

Lots and lots of things have happened since the last time I managed to blog: Guadec Hispana at Granada, Guadec at rainy (felt like home) Birmingham, Gnome Foundation Advisory Board meetings, GMAE meetings, Gnome 10th birthday, OSiM at Madrid, AGASOL, and a bunch of interesting projects we are involved in at Igalia. I have just promised myself to book some time from now on to blog much more often.

It has now been officially announced: we have joined the Advisory Board of the GNOME Foundation. Thanks to Vincent for the very warm welcome.

(BTW, hello everyone reading Planet Gnome, and thanks to Jeff for adding my feed)