As a lot of people already blogged
about it, this won't come along as the most inventive statement
ever, but: This year's GUADEC was awesome (mostly, see further
down), lot's of cool stuff going on in the GNOME world atm, and a
very necessary wakeup call / reality check for everyone in the
community. Some of my personal highlights:
*) Quite a bunch of new ideas floating around, like the GNOME
Online Desktop, PyroDesktop or other things like clutter and the
stuff going on in the mobile space. Besides what one might think of
each individual concept, what's - in my opinion - really important
here is that people are trying to experiment with new ideas.
*) Great to see some movement in the gtk+ area, especially
interesting that the people from the mobile space where the most
vocal ones in cheering for some bigger changes / improvements. The
current plan seems to be to get a phase of
experimentation going to see what people really need, something
which should result in a gtk+ 3.0 (or 4.0 ;) ) at a not yet defined
point in the future.
*) Lot's of interesting new applications floating around in the
GNOME universe, like the as-easy-as-it-gets personal file sharing
application Giver, Banter or Conduit. Unfortunately none of them in
portage. Honestly I really would like Gentoo to get more
"cutting-edge" again, an appeal it has more an more lost since I
started to use it (or did my expectations raise over the years
instead?). But that's really something for a seperate blog
entry.
*) I guess the best thing just happened by accident: As there
really wasn't a lot going on in Birmingham in the evening and the
weather sucked big time, lot's of people stayed in the lobby of the
ETAP hotel and did some collective hacking / planning / writing /
whatever. (The ETAP having free wireless didn't hurt either ;)
)
*) Met lot's of nice people, too many to name them all here, you
know who you all are ;)
So what were the bad things (besides the shitty weather)? I guess
the same as ever (and unfortunately valid for nearly all open
source projects I know):
*) There are still a lot of non-outspoken hierarchies in the whole
project. This ranges from seemingly harmless constant in-jokes
which are actually excluding everyone who hasn't been an "insider"
for ages to a very visible distinction between the
"rockstar"-hackers and everyone else. I still think GNOME - and
other open source projects - would fair better by valueing
non-coder contributions more. The very intersting talk Anne
Ostergaard gave about the organizational structure (and current
problems with that) in FLOSS was unfortunately also one of the
least well attended ones.
*) But what I really find annoying (and after some days:
exhausting) is the level of stupid remarks a lot of guys seem to
have to make about women all the time. The same guys who say some
very smart and thoughtful things about all sorts of stuff transform
into Neanderthals in parts of a second when it comes to women,
mostly reducing them to their looks. Obviously for a lot of guys
it's just not possible to treat women with the same level of
respect they show for other guys.
To sum it up: A very good conference from a technical viewpoint,
but still a lot of room for improvement when it comes to social
skills.