Safe as Milk

"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.

The LGM logo

Every conference needs a logo, and we have ours:

I really can’t thank Andreas Nilsson enough for his work on the artwork. I just didn’t have to think about it. I seem to recall discussing ideas with him on a Friday afternoon, and waking up on Saturday morning with a load of goodies in my inbox.

In his words, he “draws the pretty pictures”. And I’m very glad he came to GUADEC last year to tell us that 😉

Libre Graphics Meeting news

Some news just in about the Libre Graphics Meeting – we will have a new free software project at the conference, Xara Xtreme. The details still need to be worked out, but it’s always good to see companies converting to the GPL.

In other news:

• Gerald Friedland, the creator of SIOX will present his work Friday morning.
• Inkscape hacker & artist Andy Fitzsimon has confirmed he’ll be there, and giving an Inkscape tutorial involving “workflow and nice tips & tricks”, which promises to be cool.
• Jon Phillips (again of Inkscape) will be talking about Creative Commons – which is particularly appropriate at a conference which is likely to attract top-notch content creators.

Libre Graphics Meeting website

The Libre Graphics Meeting website is online at http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org – it’s a SPIP backed site, and I’m still trying to figure out the basics (like how the front page layout is done), and I’m looking for people willing to help out with the content. All offers welcome.

The banner to the left was designed by Andreas Nilssen, who also came up with the site’s other banner. Please feel free to use it to link to the conference site.

Many thanks to David Odin and pollux from CPE for getting the site hosted, and to Laotseu (Alexandre from ALDIL) for doing the site design and SPIP installation. And of course Andreas for the graphics.

Libre Graphics Meeting

Due to the increasingly varied nature of the projects which will be represented in Lyon March next year, the conference will undergo a name-change. The GIMP developers conference will still take place, but it will be as part of the Libre Graphics Meeting – LGM for short, if you’re into acronyms, pronounced glam. Don’t ask. Just pronounce it glam. Or say LGM. Whichever you feel like. Or just use the long name, so people know what you’re talking about.

The Libre Graphics Meeting will be a meeting of minds and bodies involved in libre graphics. That is, people who program, work with, or want to find out more about free software graphics applications. It’ll be a blast.

The web-page for now is in the GIMP wiki. Please feel free to aliment it with ideas, feedback, comments and abuse.

GimpCon update

It’s been a busy 24 hours.

• Ton Roosendaal of the Blender Foundation has tentatively accepted to present Project Orange in Lyon.
• Developers from littlecms and Inkscape have expressed an interest in coming and presenting their projects.
• There will be a contingent from Scribus, the free desktop publishing app.
• We will have at least 2 presentations around the GIMP.

I need to write all this up in a schedule, as soon as these are confirmed properly. But for the first 48 hours after the confirmation of the dates, it’s not bad at all. This’ll be a real Free Graphics dream team.