I’ve been in Caceres (Extremadura) the last three days attending the “Conferencia Internacional de Software Libre” (International Free Software Conference), one of the biggest FLOSS events in Spain.
It was a very intense days and I met a lot of friends and new interesting people.
But also was held there the GNOME Hispano meeting with people like Carlos Garcia Campos (aka Kal), Álvaro del Castillo (aka acs), José Ángel Díaz, and others gnomers.
The beginning was actually quite moving for some of us, because José made a retrospective of GNOME’s history and how GNOME Hispano was born. For those who were that night, when GNOME Hispano started this made them draw a smile in their (our) faces 🙂
I couldn’t attend all the sessions, because I had to attend also to the other conference, but they told me they were interesting. There was stuff like “GNOME Fails“, “Introduction to the Desktop course“, “The migration of GNOME Hispano’s services to OpenSolaris” and the other two sessions where I was: “Software development using git” and “GNOME and the distributions” (which, actually was mine :-P)
My talk was about how what developers make can be affected by changes on the distribution or by third party people who need to integrate their software with the desktop and more software. We were also talking about the very end users and how is more important to them some small and silly bugs than the next big and fancy feature.
We’ve learned from the experience of thousand of users in Extremadura (GNU/LinEx) and Andalusia (Guadalinex) that the very end users (people from little villages, childrens, old people, and so) don’t care so much about the new fancy stuff but they really do care about crash when they try to perform an email search on Evolution or some dialog is untranslated.
Some of those errors come from the distributions but others are responsibility of the upstream developers. I know it is much funnier to be working in a fancy feature or dealing with a very tricky bug, than take care of a hundred of silly bugs, but it’s probably that a lot of people won’t see the super-feature, just because one those silly bugs… I can tell you…
Anyways, the talk was interesting, the people was participating and we all learnt some lessons, I think. I’d like to write some conclusions to see what do you think as well…
I’ll probably do 😉
180 million euro saved because of free and open source software in schools sounds like a very good reason to increase the adoption of open source 🙂
http://www.osor.eu/news/es-cenatic-campaign-ten-reasons-for-using-open-source-in-education
So sad that there is no english translation for the homepage, do you know when the next Guadalinex (based on Ubuntu 9.10) will be released?
I would like to help with Metalink and Torrent downloads to save valuable server bandwidth and to allow faster and easier downloads for the users.
Actually the next version will be based on Ubuntu 10.04. They don’t do 2 version per year, just one.
Thanks for the offer, I will tell to the people in charge 🙂
Oh, good to know.
Thanks, I will wait for their mail.
And in the meantime I will prepare those files for the current version 😉
Your blog is awesome. Great work!