FreeDesktop Promotion: Gnome and KDE to increase collaboration

As I already blogged here, in October past year I was invited to Évora, in order to participate in a round table about “Gnome vs. KDE”. In my first slide I suggested that in my opinion a more adjusted title for the round table would have been “Free Desktops vs Proprietary Desktops”. I think fights between projects that have less than 5% of the global market is not very clever and only gives advantages to the real adversary. Specially when the projects have almost the same goals.

Well, fortunately a lot of people think this way, and that is why almost 6 years ago, in March 2000, the FreeDesktop.org project was started. During these years, the best ideas from the different Desktop projects were progressively moved to the shared software infrastructure. New projects have also been created there to avoid reinventing the wheel.

Early this year, a new project was announced to share efforts between the free software Desktop projects: Freedesktop Promotion. This time collaboration is going to happen also in the marketing area. The motivations are very well explained in this article.

Junta de Andalucía and free/libre software

A couple of days ago I read about the free software repository that the regional government of Andalucía, in Spain, had just published with all the software that they developed internally.

Impressive initiative. This is the real fact that confirms that the revolutionary law they had approved two years ago with the commitment of publishing all their software was not “just words”.

Sadly not all the news related to Andalucía are in the same direction. Today I learnt that they have just signed a millionaire collaboration contract (the biggest contract in Europe of that kind) with Oracle for administrating all their databases. Could not they have spent part of that money in improving the free software solutions in order to adapt them to their needs and the rest in paying local companies for providing support? Why don’t they want to have freedom from providers at all the levels?

Several comments about latest Gnome news

Several things are happening in the Gnome project lately, and I would like to comment some of them:

  • “The Program for Gnome Foundation” e-mail sent recently to the Gnome Foundation lists by Anne Østergaard on behalf of the GNOME Foundation Board reveals an interesting “new” approach: take care of the community we _already_ have, improve the collaboration among the participants, get more people involved inside the Foundation, more local communities, more events. I completely agree with the idea and like to see the board working in that direction.
  • I have been having a look to the GUADEC 2006 Sponsor’s brochure, and it looks very interesting. Quim and Javi are looking for sponsors, so if you want to have a place in one of the world most important Desktop oriented conferences, contact them.
  • In about 3 weeks Gnome 2.14 will be released. I think this idea of the fixed release schedule is one of the better decisions that have been taken in the project in the last years. New features will include more speed and better memory usage; new administration programs (like the lockdown editor for reducing Gnome functionality or Sabayon, a powerful tool for setting default and mandatory desktop configurations for groups of users); better search facilities in the Desktop, including integration with Beagle; a lot of new functionality in Ekiga (the new Gnome Meeting); several improvements in Metacity, a very renewed GEdit and other nice things that are explained with a lot of detail in the traditional article from Davyd Madeley A look at Gnome 2.14.
  • Banshee, the music player developed by Novell using Mono technologies is getting more and more popular. Recently it has being included as default music player in the last releases of openSUSE. It is well integrated with iPod like devices and most importantly it has a very good plugin for Audioscrobbler 🙂 You can learn more about the program in this article from Linux.com.
  • Jon Trowbridge, the creator of Beagle inside Novell (I liked a lot his talk in Stuttgart about the project), is now working for Google in his Open Source Program Office. The Beagle project is now maintained by Joe Shaw. Is Jon going to work in Gnome from Google? It seems it is still not clear, according to what he says in this interesting interview.

Long weekend in Barcelona

Last Thursday we flew to Barcelona for a long weekend visit to two very good friends that have been living there for 5 years now. We normally visit them at least twice per year, and thought that this was a good moment for disconnecting and have some relax.

The city was as awesome as always, and we enjoyed a lot our walks through Passeig de Gràcia and Les Rambles, and our traditional visit on Sunday to the secondhand book market outside the Mercat de Sant Antoni, were we bought again all kind of nice books. We had also time to visit Vic and Girona, both really beautiful cities I had never been at. And even went to a concert of Antonio de Pinto, a very good (and very unknown) cantautor from Madrid.

My next visit to Catalunya will hopefully be by the end of June, in order to attend the 7th Guadec (Gnome Conference) that will take place in Vilanova i la Geltrú.