Safe as Milk

SIGGRAPH

I can finally lift the veil on something that I’ve been involved with for a while now…

The Blender Foundation, the GNOME Foundation, the GIMP developers and the Uni-verse consortium have grouped together to hire and build a giant 20×30 island booth in the main aisle of the SIGGRAPH trade show in Boston in August. We had some help from an anonymous donor, and Ton has done a huge amount of work pulling all the strings together.

I’m really excited about this – SIGGRAPH is a huge show, and free software will be right in the middle of it – no more skulking in the corner of the “Open Source Exhibition” where the organisers hide the guys who can’t afford to be in the main hall and give then a 6×6 space to put up a computer – we have prime real estate.

I have all sorts of ideas about how GNOME and the GIMP can use this opportunity – from hob-nobbing with Hollywood types to showing off XGL, Cairo and all of the user interface work that people in the project have been doing.

I’ll be looking for volunteers over the next few weeks to halp with the stand – keep the dates in your mind when taking your Summer holidays – July 30th to August 3rd (exhibition from 1st to 3rd), Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.

Planet GIMP

I happened across the GIMP user frappr map today – I was thinking of creating one, in fact, when I found out that there were two – http://www.frappr.com/thegimp exists as well!

It would be great to merge these, and have a really good map of GIMP users and developers around the world. So, get to it! And if you’re on neither, well, add yourself to http://www.frappr.com/gimp straight away. Tell them Dave sent you, you get a 20% discount.

Nice story on GNU/Linux migration

Via Marcus Bauer on the marketing list: An art professor gets his students using free software.

There are some gotchas for using external devices like scanners and tablets, but all in all, it’s a nice mix of GTK+ and QT applications which just goes to show that at least in this domain, we’re not in competition with KDE.

Can’t stand waiting

Heady times.

I’ve been away from home with work quite a bit over the past few months, but I’ve still found time to get the conference (http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org for those who haven’t been paying attention) more or less organised.

We will have t-shirts. We will have goodie bags. We will have conferencees. We will have a big mess tryoing to figure out how to manage workshops, demos and BOFs. We will have food & drink. We will even have name badges!

I’m in that twilight state where you’ve put a lot of work into something, and you’re not sure how it’s going to go down. Will it be a roaring success or a giant flop? Will everyone (or most people) come away happy or annoyed at having wasted a weekend? I can’t wait, but I’m a little nervous all the same. I just want to get to Friday morning.

Now, I’ll just need to throw together a presentation to open the conference. In an hour between putting the kids to bed and leaving home to go away with work (again) this week. Thankfully, there has been a great team involved in the conference so far, so the last minute organisation and set-up is in good hands.

See you all in Lyon next week.

LUGRadio

I gave an interview last night to Jono and the boys on LUGRadio about the Libre Graphics Meeting.

I don’t think I was particularly good – I was a bit scattered, which probably reflects the conference, and I’m not sure I got the core points across – getting artists and developers together and learning from each other, getting developers working together from different projects, sharing a passion and love for free software with a bunch of people we don’t meet very often.

That’s what you get for doing interviews after 10pm, after a 10 hour working day and a board meeting.

Anyway, we’ll see how it sounds after it’s passed through the magic remixing fingers of Mr. Bacon et al.

"Conferences suck"

Jeff Jarvis on conferences:

Too many conferences suck [...] They are all about speeches and not about conversation and argument and learning and meeting. They don’t capture the expertise of the crowd.

Reading this gives me great pleasure, since the Libre Graphics Meeting is all about conversation and argument and learning and meeting. The last bit’s even in the name, it’s so important.

So most of the great, exciting stuff that’s going to happen at the conference, you won’t find on the schedule.

Carl Worth is coming along to meet people interested in Cairo. A contingent from HP’s imaging team will be popping in to get their kit working better with free software. Rui Campos is going to give a 5 hour workshop on Blender. The GIMP developers are going to have a meeting. The Scribus developers are all going to meet for the first time in real life. A bunch of Inkscape developers are coming along to have a laugh and work with a group from Xara.

I’ve never been so excited about a conference. It’s going to be passionnate people from different projects, all in the same place, scribbling their notes and designs and explanations on beermats and paper serviettes, but also, thanks to the fact that there will be time during the conference when there are no planned presentations, perhaps they’ll be scribbling on whiteboards, laptops and paper.

The community, work + pleasure, community aspect of a conference is also something I want to be important for GUADEC this year, and with Quim at the helm, we’re well on our way.

Oh – and listen out for a quick bit on the Libre Graphics Meeting during the last episode (right at the end) of LUGRadio, season 3, episode 8, in all good websites now.

LGM registration is open!

Registration for the Libre Graphics Meeting is open. We debated for a while whether a registration page was really worth it, since the conference is free and open to attend.

We came to the conclusion that it was, if only to give us an idea how many people were coming, so that we could order roughly the right amount of t-shirts, conference packs and sandwiches.

One conspicuous absence is an “I need accommodation” field – we are not going to organise accommodation. We should have a list of hotels, and a block booking in a youth hostel, in the next couple of weeks, though. Lyon is quiet in mid-march, so it’s probably not something people need to worry too much about yet.

So – if you’re coming to LGM, please come & register! We won’t spam you (honest!) and you’ll be helping us out.

Krita is now officially blowing my mind

Boudewijn Rempt has made an art of dropping short notes about HUGE features in his blog. Yesterday, he wrote this:

Casper Boemann has added a 16-bit L*a*b colorspace to Krita and thoroughly reviewed the color management path making it very dependable. And now that Adobe allows anyone to download and package a set of high quality icc profiles with their application, the results are good, too. Casper has also added autoscroll to KPresenter and Krita, and the code is generic, so it can spread to other KOffice apps.

Holy shit!!!

I guess they’ve got the object model for the data sorted out, and now it’s just a question of implementing the back-ends, and putting an interface on them. This is massive. Krita can now do 8 bit integer, 16 bit integer, La*b*, RGB, CMYK… these guys are adding major new functionality every week these days. I recently asked Boudewijn if there were plans to add support for floating point, and he reckoned it would be possible to do in a couple of weeks (!)

I guess all they’re missing to take over the world is a plug-in framework, and a bunch of 3rd party plug-ins.

Bounties and the GIMP 2

Sven wrote a response to my analysis of a GIMP bounty in my blog.

From the point on that Daniel dissapeared, the bounties have been dead and there was nothing that we could have done about that. Your summary puts it like there would have been an offer on the table all the time. But there wasn’t. There was a deal between Mark and Daniel and that deal had failed. It would have been wrong to assume that there was still a valid offer at this point. Without clearly defined milestones, there are no bounties.

I disagree with that, since plainly, Mark considered the bounties were offered to the project, and weren’t a deal between himself and Daniel. In addition, for the 18 months between when the bounty was proposed and was pulled, to my knowledge, Sven didn’t send an email to Mark asking him about the bounties. I think a little more communication could have cleared up a lot of questions much earlier.

My biggest regret in the whole affair is that we could have announced the offer far & wide, and had maybe some new contributors, but because of this single perception that the bounties were somehow “a deal between Mark and Daniel”, a great opportunity went to waste.

Bounties and the GIMP

Finally getting this off my TODO list…

A few years ago, bounties became a popular way to try to get features written for free software programs. “I don’t have time or skills to offer”, the logic went, “but I have some money, and perhaps that’ll raise the priority of what’s important to me for some young student out there”.

The idea is sound, as far as it goes. Ximian pioneered it in GNOME, LinuxFund was founded on the principle.

Mark Shuttleworth has also offered bounties for a large number of projects, including a little-known offer of $30,000 to the GIMP project. I have written up the story of that bounty. I’m hoping that we can all learn something from it.