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.
For those who have forgotten, the closing date for the submission of GUADEC abstracts is really soon.
You can submit an abstract directly on the GUADEC web site (after creating an account). The deadline for submissions is the 31st of March, and since the conference is now only 3 months away, you might want to get a move-on.
You can have a look at the existing list of abstracts on the site too to get ideas. Just search for all articles with the “Presentation” type.
So, the Libre Graphics Meeting is over.
No matter how much you do for a conference, there’s always more you could have done. I have had people sending me mail all weekend saying that they heard about the conference too late to come – all I can say is that this conference was such a success that there will definitely be a second act next year, somewhere around the world, so you’ll have another chance.
Over 3 days, we had an experiment in conference planning. To make things a little easier for us, we arranged for the GNOME CVS to SVN migration to be sabotaged, but in revenge the GNOME hackers persuaded Lyon’s tram drivers to go on strike on the day of the conference.
We had some really great presentations (all I can say about Xara is “Wow!”), and with people like Carl Worth and Bdale Garbee coming along to hang out for the weekend, there were lots of thought provoking conversations flying around.
For the first two days, the presentations created a central theme to the conference, and allowed people to get a decent overview of some of what’s happening in the various projects. And then on Sunday, the “unorganised” day, we had around 20 sessions on things like the Create project, running Photoshop plug-ins under Linux (without Wine, I think), documentation around the graphics applications, collaboration between Xara and Inkscape, FontForge and the Open Font Lincence, a bunch of Blender workshops but the very cool Rui Campos, and more (my head was hurting at one stage trying to figure out what was going on). It was just the right side of uncontrolled chaos, and it was enormously beneficial to all who attended.
And lots of people came. I was estimating between 200 and 300 people, and we were in that range over the three days, with over 150 people each day on Friday and Saturday.
But we didn’t want this to be a huge conference. The best thing, in my opinion, about the conference was the time we gave people to meet and talk, and the greatest compliment someone could make about the conference would be that they came away with more friends afterwards than before.
Here’s to next year’s organisers. The discussion about who will host the conference next year will be happening on the Create mailing list, which you can find on freedesktop.org – and anyone who has a blog, and works in creative free software applications, send rejon or bryce your RSS feed and get added to the blogroll at create.freedesktop.org.
Oh, and a small side note to say “Up Ireland!”
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.
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.
I envy people with the sense of humour and subtlety to come up with a t-shirt like this.
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.
To celebrate my recent addition to Planet Advocacy, I’m going to tell a little story about bad advocacy. In fact, it’s hard to call this advocacy at all…
About 6 months ago, the GIMP developers were contacted by a concerned citizen about a company called Luxuriousity, who was rebranding and selling free software on-line, via Ebay and on their website. The person contacting us believed there were shenanigans going on, and that we should unleash the lawyers on them, or something.
I contacted Luxuriousity via the email address on their site, and asked whether they were aware of the conditions imposed by the GPL on distribution of binaries. They were, and pointed me towards gimp.org as a way to get the full source code. I did ask if they had an FTP server where I could get their modified sources, but they didn’t have one, and said they didn’t need one, since they included the source code on the CD they ship with the binaries, and provide an offer of source code on a CD to anyone who asks.
So, there’s two issues here.
First, Luxuriousity are selling GPL software. That is fine. Nothing wrong with it, there’s no requirement in the GPL to give credit, they haven’t removed copyright notices from source files, if they’re making money out of it it would be nice to help out and sponsor things like <plug>the Libre Graphics Meeting</plug> but there’s no requirement to do so.
Second, there’s the trademark issue. Luxuriousity rebrands the original programs, so there is no trademark issue. In fact, some people (notably MySQL) have insisted that they not use their trademarks, so they now consciously avoid the issue by renaming everything. This is no different than Inkscape being a rebranding of Sodipodi, or CinePaint rebranding the GIMP.
Now, these are complex issues that I don’t fully understand myself, and many in our community have strongly-held and passionate misunderstandings of these issues that go far beyond my own. People feel wronged (hurt even) that someone is “stealing” something they hold so dear and making a quick buck out of it by pretending it’s their own work. But since the copyright notices are intact, there is no such pretense. The developers have simply allowed people to redistribute their work.
If you followed the link to the Luxuriousity site earlier, you will have seen “System is currently down”. If you look for their software on ebay, you won’t find it. If you try to buy software from some of the pages behind the front page which are now available, you won’t be able to. Our community, on the basis of a flawed understanding of our foundations, has collectively hounded the company out of business. Their Ebay and Paypal accounts have been cancelled, and their server has been subjected to multiple DDOS attacks. They made the front page of digg, and some of the comments on that story are shameful:
1:
He’s gonna get DDOS by a whole bunch of people. i just know it. i hope so at least.
2:
http://digg.com/security/Kicking_A_Spammer_In_The_Nuts_Daily_Turns_Out_To_Be_Effective
You know what to do.
3:
Get wget or soemthing similar installed and in your system path variable and put the following in a .bat file:
:up wget http://www.luxuriousity.com/images/sidephoto.jpg del sidephoto.jpg goto upthen just run it and hope he enjoys the bandwidth bill.
This type of behaviour does not do any favours to us or to our community. It’s against the spirit of free software. In fact, it makes me sick to think about it. The free software community I know and love is a fuzzy happy hippy place where people do good for their neighbours for no other reason than it gives them pleasure to make the world a better place.
It’s clear that that community has grown fast, and not everyone has taken the time to understand the nuances of what we do – we have a huge job to educate newcomers about the freedoms which we give to people by using the GPL. We cannot tolerate this kind of behaviour, and the only way to prevent it is education. Let’s make sure the diggers and slashdotters know what it means to be part of the free software community – not just the benefits, but the responsibilities as well.
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.
I’m looking forward to the board hand-over meeting tonight. There was a similar twilight zone last year where new board members kind of go “what happens next?” and new board members probably don’t do enough hand-holding. The passing of the torch is the moment when the new board realises that the old board wasn’t really that good, and they can do better 😉 It should be interesting.
And, Christian: the midnight oil is the oil you burn at midnight in your lamp. “Burning the midnight oil” just means keeping the lights on late.
