{"id":12,"date":"2009-07-04T22:28:05","date_gmt":"2009-07-04T20:28:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.igalia.com\/femorandeira\/?p=12"},"modified":"2009-07-04T22:28:05","modified_gmt":"2009-07-04T20:28:05","slug":"first-day-at-the-gcds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.igalia.com\/femorandeira\/2009\/07\/04\/first-day-at-the-gcds\/","title":{"rendered":"First day at the GCDS"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is my first post about this year’s Desktop Summit in Gran Canaria<\/a>, and also the first entry in this blog for a long long time. My intention is to keep a diary of the conferences here, if I can find time between attending the talks and going to the beach.<\/p>\n

The first talk<\/a> of the day was given by Robert Leftkowitz. He made the case for software development as a liberal art, and Free and Open Software as the kind of software “that a gentleman would use”<\/em>.\u00a0 The concepts he used go back a long, long way. It is extremely uncommon to hear ancient Greek philosophers being quoted in a keynote. It is always reassuring to think that two or three thousand years ago human being just like us encountered the same problems and moral dilemmas that we face today. By the way, I had never before heard someone say that software is rethoric<\/em>, and it is a suggestive idea.<\/p>\n

The second keynote<\/a> was given by Walter Bender, who gave a overview of the Sugar learning platform and the humane and altruistic motivation behind it, always keeping a “low floor and no ceiling”<\/em> attitude. I specially remember one simple sentence that has hidden depths:<\/p>\n

“Nothing in our children’s future resembles 1970’s office work”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The third keynote<\/a> was given by Richard Stallman, and it was weird. I have seen Stallman a few times, but never before had he managed to fit a history lesson, a flamewar about C#, an auction for a gnu and the geekiest song on Earth in the same talk. My life would have been completed if at some point he had drawn a couple of katanas<\/a> to fight the enemies of freedom.<\/p>\n

After lunch, Quim Gil gave the news<\/a> that Nokia will discard GTK+ and Hildon for the Harmattan release of their Maemo platform, and will be turning to Qt as the main UI toolkit as part of a bigger Nokia movement. He also discussed some of the free technologies that will continue to form the base of the software run by the Internet Tablets.<\/p>\n

The lightning talks<\/a> were quite entertaining, but some of the projects exposed (i.e. Gothenburg, stuff around Nepomuk, etc…) could certainly have deserved a bit more time.<\/p>\n

See you tomorrow!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is my first post about this year’s Desktop Summit in Gran Canaria, and also the first entry in this blog for a long long time. My intention is to keep a diary of the conferences here, if I can find time between attending the talks and going to the beach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,7,8,9,11,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-free-software","category-gcds","category-gnome","category-gnu","category-igalia","category-maemo","category-planetigalia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.igalia.com\/femorandeira\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.igalia.com\/femorandeira\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.igalia.com\/femorandeira\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.igalia.com\/femorandeira\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.igalia.com\/femorandeira\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.igalia.com\/femorandeira\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.igalia.com\/femorandeira\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.igalia.com\/femorandeira\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.igalia.com\/femorandeira\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}