Into the bubble - out of the bubble.

So GCDS is over - unfortunately. And I somehow made it home safely, but that's a different story

The Conference on Gran Canaria was - in a nutshell - just great. Organization was probably perfect, and the people in a very good & relaxed mood, always ready for discussing different issues around the free desktop or just having fun.

Stallman's keynote was discussed and criticised a lot already, especially the part about Mono. Interesting - maybe not surprising though - is, that the last time I saw him at Chalmers Technical University, he gave an almost similar speech to a technical but certainly not predominantly free software affine audience. Especially at this speech at Chalmers it was obvious that his FS evangelism and way of interacting with people did not really serve the purpose of making people think about Free Software or even switch. It actually made people very angry, because he was often disrespecting to them in his manners and not addressing the critical points they brought up in the discussion.
This was about a year ago and really sad to see. I was a bit surprised then at his GCDS Keynote because the people there, who are involved in Free Software, seemed to actually feel in a very similar way like the non Free Software audience in Chalmers. Besides his never doubted merits it leaves me wondering if his talks are really helpful to promote Free Software for either kind of audience.
Very interesting however, was RMS recapitulation of the KDE/QT story. I knew the story, but did not have it in mind very completely any more. Also his perspective was new to me.

Another interesting keynote was the one of Walter Bender. I only want to emphasise the "low floor, no ceiling" approach he talked about and which they are embracing for the Sugar Platform. I like this paradigm and very much agree with it. That means that. if we get somebody who started off only listening to some music and in the end is able to produce his own music with a similar, seamless software stack, we are close to perfection in User Interfaces.

Surprisingly the Lightning Talk session was in the large hall. Anyhow, in the end that made giving the talk even more fun. I got some good feedback and at least the idea behind my project will continue, see below.

Besides listening to talks, giving one myself and having inspiring conversations I helped out a bit at the registration desk, selling merchandise and using the free time in between to talk with Adam, who is doing some really awesome stuff in order to bring TeX into a nice GNOMEy UI. Everybody who saw his lightning talk knows about it, otherwise I guess you can soon check: http://github.com/reviczky. As as scientist who needs TeX a lot, not only because of its awesome capabilities to print formulas, I am really looking forward to Adam's work.

Among a lot of others I also spoke with Seif. We will cooperate on doing something which he calls "Gothenburg on Crack", or Cookiemonster. This will bring the idea behind Project Gothenburg together with Zeitgeist and some other cool technology. Expect some news on this soonish.

Putting Akademy with GUADEC at one place I consider to have been successful. I had the chance to speak with quite some of the KDE folks and it was nice to see they are really decent people which basically have the same mindset. Of course no one reasonably doubts that both is the case, but experiencing this makes a difference.

All this would not have been possible for me to experience without the support of the GNOME Foundation. Simply amazing that it worked out that way. Thanks a bunch!

However, the most important question on the conference, was one asked by Daniel Siegel: Where is the Travelling Gnome?