Author: GNOME Foundation

Should free and open source projects and companies require people to sign community agreements in order to contribute, possibly signing over their copyrights? Karen Sandler, GNOME Foundation Executive Director, will be chairing an expert panel on this question at this year’s Desktop Summit in Berlin. The panel will include Mark Shuttleworth, Michael Meeks and Bradley Kuhn.

More details can be found on the Desktop Summit website.

We are pleased to announce that the Desktop Summit 2011 in Berlin will be supported by Intel as Platinum sponsor. The event also welcomes Collabora and SUSE as Gold partners. The organization is delighted with the community spirit of these generous corporate partners. Mirko Boehm, Lead organizer of the Desktop Summit, said: “Their support is essential for the Desktop Summit’s efforts to bring together Free Software developers from all around the world to work in a collaborative spirit on the next generation desktop technology.”

Dawn Foster, MeeGo Community Manager stated: “Intel is happy to sponsor the Desktop Summit as a way to support the many projects that we use and contribute to on a regular basis. It’s important to us to work closely with open source projects – and this is one way to do that.”

Christian Schaller, Marketing Manager at Collabora told us: “At Collabora we are excited to support the Desktop Summit as we feel it is one of the core events in terms of moving the open source ecosystem forward. A lot of open source innovation happens on the desktop first before being widely deployed on all kinds of systems and devices. As the leader in the fields of multimedia and real time communications Collabora are very much a part of that effort. We look forward to meeting up with and engaging with the everyone at the Desktop Summit.”

“SUSE is proud to be a Gold Sponsor of the Desktop Summit 2011,” said Michael Miller, vice president of Global Alliances and Marketing at SUSE.“Cross project collaboration is a core value at SUSE and we are committed to wide interoperability and open communication. Our support of openSUSE at the Desktop Summit demonstrates our continued commitment to a strong Free and Open Source ecosystem.”

Aside from the Platinum and Gold sponsors, we are happy to welcome the following Silver sponsors for this event:

• Canonical
• Google
• Igalia
• The Linux Foundation
• Qt
• Red Hat

The following are our Bronze level sponsors:

• Lanedo
• Mozilla
• OpenShine

Their support is greatly appreciated.

Our media partners for the Desktop Summit will be golem.de and Linux Magazine.

The organizing team would like to thank our sponsors on behalf of the GNOME and KDE communities! We are still looking for more sponsors, please contact us if you are interested (details below).

About the Desktop Summit

GUADEC (GNOME Users And Developers European Conference) and Akademy (KDE annual world summit) are the world’s largest gatherings of people involved in Free Desktop and mobile user interfaces. Over a thousand participants are expected at the Desktop Summit this year, covering both the GNOME and KDE projects as well as related technologies. Organizers welcome developers, artists, translators, community organizers, users and representatives from government, education, businesses. Anyone who shares an interest in a Free Desktop is encouraged to participate.

GNOME and KDE are Free Software communities that drive the user interfaces of many Linux-powered
devices–smartphones, laptops, desktops, personal media centers. 2011 is the second summit organized collaboratively by the two communities.

Contact

Contact information of the Desktop Summit team can be found on www.desktopsummit.org/contact. For press inquiries please contact Jos Poortvliet, jospoortvliet@gmail.com, phone +31622377545.

If you would like to discuss sponsorship, please contact us: ds-sponsoring@desktopsummit.org

The GNOME Quarterly report is a document that comes out four times a year and highlights some of the efforts our teams have been up to of late. This quarters edition brings news from the Release Team, Art and Usability, Bug Squad, Marketing, Mobile, Website, Documentation, Membership, Events, Outreach Program for Women, GNOME User Groups, Localization and Accessibility.
Read the full report here

The DesktopSummit 2011 team is pleased to announce the Intel AppUpSM Application Lab: MeeGo Series. The session will take place at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany as part of the Desktop Summit. Intel® is the Platinum Sponsor of the Summit.

Scheduled from 15:00-18:00 on August 10th, this free, hands-on training aims to show application developers how to monetize their applications through the Intel AppUp Developer Program and its community.

Find out more on the Desktop Summit website.

Continuing our series of interviews with Desktop Summit keynote speakers, William Carlson spoke to Dirk Hohndel, Intel’s Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist, about the relationship between business and Open Source. Interesting insights from a hacker-turned-businessman with a track record in the Linux kernel and XFree86.

On whether Open Source is a selling point for consumers:

Consumers shouldn’t need to know or care whether the product they are using is based on open source software or not […] I believe that consumers should feel the consequence of more open source software – in the sense that they see more innovation, better software, better ability to upgrade and modify software if they so choose. Those are qualities that are meaningful to consumers. The license used to create the software IMHO isn’t.

Read the full interview here.

The second in our series of Desktop Summit keynote interviews is with Claire Rowland, Head of Research at Fjord, an international digital service design agency.

Claire will be talking to us about user interface design in the era of cloud services: the axis of user experience has shifted away from the desktop towards services delivered through multiple platforms of widely differing form factors and the cloud.  What does this mean for what users expect from their devices, and what does effective design across platforms, and the cloud, look like?

Among other things, Claire talked to us about what inspires her:

Wondering how people and cultures will change in the future in response to changes in society and technology. I’ve tried very hard to overcome this, but I have only a limited interest in cutting edge technology for its own sake; I want to know how we can use technology to improve people’s lives, make them smarter, happier, healthier and all sorts of other good things.

Read the full interview here.

Desktop Summit keynote speaker Thomas Thwaites gave an interview to us recently, covering a wide range of subjects. Thomas, who launched the Toaster Project in 2008, explores the relationship between technology, design and society. This interview is a sneak peek into the kinds of subjects that he is interested in.

Q: What makes you happy about what you do?

A: Well I think kind of trampling across boundaries between disciplines, areas of knowledge and so on, makes me quite happy about what I do. So I can be doing research in to something from a range of directions – browser tabs open for a particular project I’m doing at the moment range through medical prosthetic suppliers, journal articles on the evolution of flying dinosaurs and stress response in childhood, ebay auctions for deer skulls, WW2 gas rattles, and orthopaedic slings etc… and then I’m off to this workshop to mould some fibreglass… So I guess I really like the variety in the work I’ve found myself doing.

Read the full interview here