Post-GUADEC splashdown

July 6, 2006 4:49 pm Dave Neary guadec

So – back to normal life after a week at GUADEC where I was the most disconnected person there. (Anyone who would like to offer me a laptop is welcome)

I spent more time outside talk sessions than I did inside them, but I still managed to see some awesome talks.

Simon Phipps from Sun Microsystems gave a nice session which tries to answer the often asked question, “why do companies spend money on free software and then give the results away?” (although he would probably have said open source). Almost the same presentation got some pretty spun press coverage earlier in the week. I guess we’re less radical in the GNOME world – the core message was “everyone wins by co-operating, but co-operation only happens when the individual’s self-interest aligns with that of others”. Or something along those lines.

Kathy Sierra got a lot of response already – suffice it to say that I really enjoyed her talk.

Luis Villa brought a tear to my eye (perhaps it was the fatigue) during his closing presentation.

jim Gettys’ talk on OLPC was eye-opening, if only because of the size of the laptops these guys are making. Overall, the talk was a little too technical for me, and I would have preferred to hear more about the “why” – how does the project plan to change the world? What will the kids do with their laptops?

The talk bu Luis Angel from Extremadura and GNOME-Hispano and Antonio José Sáenz from Andalucia was eye-opening both because of the sheer scale, and because of the thought that has been put into it. Both speakers insisted – computers in schools are a tool, not a goal. GNOME enables learning. But we have lessons to learn about remote deployment and management – our current infrastructure doesn’t scale. We need to start spreading the word about how Andalucia are handling their 200,000 computers (and soon to be 800,000).

The lightning talks were great, and came off surprisingly smoothly. I wish I’d noticed that Avid and Pitivi were back to back, but I am really happy to have seen the all-jumping, all-juggling Chronojump presentation, and Stuart Langridge’s surprising Jackfield talk (download and use 8% of all Mac Dashboard widgets as they are on your GNOME desktop!). The Elisa media center was very impressive too.

I also got to see Federico talking about the “measure, change, remeasure” mantra of performance hacking, and I thought it was an interesting trick to apply the same mantra to 10×10 – growing the user base as a performance hack.

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