Lying on bed with an empty stomach, the first thing emerges in my mind is the packed meal offered on GNOME Asia 2010.
Right, I’m a little lazy. This post should be written earlier. But now, I find a good excuse for my laziness. Don’t you think the memories, which you can still remember after a period of time, are what really worth a mention? Aha, really good excuse!
The first thing to mention is, of course, my presentation. Tim Miao and I combined our session. Tim talked about GNOME accessibility testing, and I did a introduction to GNOME accessibility development. This is my first time doing presentation on a GNOME summit, so I was a little intense. The whole process ran a little faster than it has been expected. It’s somewhat disappointing that in the Q&A section, there was just one question about development. One reason for this is perhaps the presentation was too fast for listeners to understand. Another reason is probably that there were few developers attending our session. My experience on the summit proved the latter. It is a common issue of the open source world that most people just pay attention to open source than really do development.
Another thing which impresses me deeply is the hard work of the foundation board members. During these days, they always worked until wee hours to discuss the future of GNOME. How to attract more users, how to involve more developers, and how to make more money to support the running of the committee… I think these were all hot topics in their discussion. They are all volunteers. They get no pay from the committee. I don’t know why they choose this “job”, but what they have done really promoted the growth of the open source world.
Oh, my stomach is singing, and I must conclude. Besides the happiness of this journey to GNOME Asia, I think there are much more to think about for the living of GNOME, and even the whole open source world. We need more developers, but only developers cannot keep a company running. We need more ideas to get profit, but this is not the advantage of developers. We should involve more people in marketing areas. I know profiting is not the motivation of open source, but facing with the problem of living, we must change. Just as what the well-known saying in stock investment tells, keep living is the most important.
Just two cents of a person with an empty stomach and a screwed head.