my blog

Friday 10 April 2009

Being out of the virtual world at Solutions Linux 2009

Last week was Solutions Linux, one of the big free software events in France each year. And of course I went to there (thanks Novell for letting me go there on work days!). While still in Paris, it moved from CNIT La Défense to Porte de Versailles, which was a good thing: it felt really better there. We did have some good web access, but as usual, it was nearly impossible to read mails, do IRC and generally communicate to the outside world. A good excuse to breathe a bit, if you ask me!

The GNOME booth was great. We were face-to-face with our KDE friends, and we had some good time with them. On the booth itself, we had t-shirts and stickers (like for FOSDEM), and the Events Box that made it in time, although we asked for it a bit late. Since we had quite some stickers left at the end, we put a good bunch of them in the box. A good bunch as in around 2500. That should be enough for a few events! Feel free to send a postcard to GNOME-FR to thank us if you get some of those stickers...

Of course, I also went from time to time to the Novell stand: there were SUSE Studio kiosks for people to try, which were more or less always in use by people. This wasn't really surprising since SUSE Studio is quite cool. There were also some Batman-spotlight-like Novell pen -- I first said I don't need another pen, even if it has a light, and then discovered that it was a spotlight. And fell in love with the concept :-)

The french gang was there: Frédéric (not the other Frédéric who couldn't make it, but I was lucky to see him when I went spying in the Mandriva offices), Christophe (who was kind enough to host me for a few days, thanks!), Michael Scherer (I hope it's the right blog ;-)), Pascal, Luis (the French one, or French-Portugese, or just Portugese ;-)), Dodji, Daniel, etc. This was obviously some great times with all those cool people!

During the event, I gave two talks: one about the GNOME history and philosophy and one about freedesktop.org. Both went well, although I couldn't stop talking for the first one, while the second one could probably have done with more examples in a demo. I'm also still wondering if they were really suited for the audience: since it's more a commercial event than a community event; it's not really easy to know if all the audience enjoyed the community-related talks...

Last week was also when we started the serious planning for GNOME 3.0. It was actually weird to be isolated from the rest of the world at this time: it was first a challenge to coordinate with the rest of the release team for all this, and then I missed the initial feedback. Which might actually be a good thing ;-) I still plan to read articles and comments, but after taking a quick look at the beginning of this week, it was quite interesting to see some people saying that the planning announced nothing really big for the users (it's a developer release), while some other people were worried that the end user changes might have a bad impact, and then another group was praising the revolution that is planned. Not sure if there's any conclusion to draw there ;-)

Thursday 2 April 2009

A look forward at GNOME 3.0

You might remember this:

GNOME 2.30 = GNOME 3.0

It's been a long time coming, but if the proposal that was presented at GUADEC caught your attention and if you're curious to know more about GNOME 3.0, you will definitely want to read the detailed planning that the release team prepared. While the GUADEC proposal was mainly about the idea of doing GNOME 3.0, we also hoped that it would bootstrap a new period where people would begin serious planning about it. And it did happened: before, people tended to only propose ideas on paper; after GUADEC, we started seeing more concrete roadmaps, proposals and code.

I strongly believe the planning we've been working on is the right way to do things, and I surely hope it will be well-received by the community. I don't want to summarize the mail here, so just check it out (interestingly, it breaks in the web archives because of a line starting with From and the mail is split in two: second part here) or check the wiki version, read the thread that it will create, or look at Andre's post or Lucas' post about all this.

by Vincent