The slides I used in my talks at the aLANtejo 2005 have been finally published in the webpage of the conference:
This year the event is going to take place 20-22 of October in Évora, Portugal.
Two small but very interesting documents have been published recently in the community webpage of Igalia:
All kind of comments, suggestions and contributions are very welcome.
Bruce Tate writes a nice article comparing the concurrency models in Java and Erlang (and talking about how Java could learn from Erlang) at IBM developerWorks.
From Igalia, we have submitted 3 talk/BoF proposals for the next Guadec, that will take place in less than two months in Vilanova i la Geltrú, Catalonia:
All have been provisionally placed in the skeleton schedule (the first two are part of the core Guadec days, and the third is proposed for the After Hours Workshops, during the last two days of the conference).
In a few days the committee will confirm which proposals are finally accepted.
Someone asked me some weeks ago for a complete list of all the software I daily use (as a laptop user, not as a developer, because that is a different business), so here it is:
I use other programs now and then, but this is the complete list of the ones I currently depend on. Some of them I have been using for years, some others I have just discovered. Most of them are part of the Gnome project. Most of them are GTK based.
I only use daily two proprietary pieces of software: acroread because I need to read some PDFs still not supported by Evince or other free readers; and skype because I save a lot of money, when travelling, using skypeout.
I will do again the same list next year by the same month in order to check how stable I am selecting my software.
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.
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 things are happening in the Gnome project lately, and I would like to comment some of them:
After some figths with Apache and PlanetPlanet, it seems that our brand new Planet is up! Now we will need a new look and feel, hackergotchies, and probably a nice logo.
Add the RSS feed to your favourite reader and stay tunned.
Yesterday I came back from aLANtejo, one of the main technology related conferences in Portugal, organized yearly by the Núcleo de Estudantes de Engenharia em Informática (Computer Science Students Association) of University of Évora.
I was there representing the Gnome project (my travel expenses where partially funded by the Gnome Foundation), in order to participate in a round table with the a priori polemic title “Gnome vs. KDE”.
Finally, I was also invited by the organization to give a 90 minutes talk introducing the Gnome project, including some technical tutorial, due to the massive presence of Computer Science students and in general people with computer science background among the public. So I presented the project history, goals, and its underlying technologies (30 minutes); I gave a short tutorial of Glade/GTK/C and Gnome programming (40 minutes); and finally talked a bit about Love and how to collaborate becoming a member of the Gnome project (20 minutes). It was a great experience, with a lot of people in the audience, and I had afterwards a lot of feedback from all kind of people interested in the project, from students to members of some local and international companies that were also attending and wanted to know more about collaboration opportunities.
After my talk, we started the round table. From the KDE side the person representing the project was Joseff Spilner, from Germany. The round table was moderated by a teacher from the University of Évora, that was giving turns to both of us and asking some generic but very interesting questions about similarities and differences among the projects approaches to develop a free(dom) desktop. I had prepared some slides the day before trying to be a bit polemic (in a constructive way), and they were used by all of us in order to improvise a script for the discussion. There were also a lot of questions and comments from the public, some of them more critical with KDE and others with Gnome. I tried to summarize what I think are the main advantages of Gnome: big industry support (we talked quite a lot here about licensing, a quite big difference also that has to be taken into account), very clean user interface, releases every 6 months, ambitious subprojects and platforms/technologies (Mono was a very interesting topic, as always, and quite polemic indeed), integration of other big actors like OO.org or Mozilla, and so on.
It was always nice to attend to the rest of the talks. In general the level of the conference was very good, and I had the opportunity to met for the first time some very interesting people, like Joseff Spilner itself, or Alex Beregszaszi, maintainer of the mplayer project, or Xavier de Blas, who closed the aLANtejo with his very funny but also educative Linux Show.
As a curiosity, I talked all the time in Galician Portuguese, and everything went very softly. It was my first experience in a Portuguese speaking conference, so I asked in the beginning of my talk if everyone was understanding me correctly, and the unanimous answer from the audience was saying that without any problem. In this corner of the world where I happen live there are a lot of linguistic conflicts and polemics, some of them discussing if we speak Portuguese or something “similar but different”, but that is itself subject for a big blog entry, and I will leave this for other day. The fact is that I could communicate without any problem in Évora in my mother tongue, and that is something always great 🙂
Finally, I would like to thank Bruno Teixeira (who contacted me and organized all my travel and stay) and all the organization of the conference for the great work they have done. See you next year!