This summer, GUADEC, the GNOME Users and Developers Conference took place in Gothenburg, Sweden. It’s a lovely city, especially in summer, with nice people, excellent beers, and good infrastructure. Fun fact: Unisex toilet seem to be very popular in Gothenburg. The conference was hosted in sort of a convention centre and was well equipped to serve our needs. I guess we’ve been around 150 people to come together in order to discuss and celebrate our favourite Free Software project: GNOME.
One of the remarkable talks I attended was given by Matthias Kirschner from the FSFE presented on software freedom and how is concerned about the computer as a general purpose machine. So his talk was title “The computer as a Universal Machine”. He was afraid that the computing machines we are using become more and more special purpose devices rather than a general purpose machine. He gave examples of how he thinks that has happened, like corporations hiding the source code or otherwise limit access to change the behaviour of the computing machines we are using. Other examples were media with Digital Restrictions Management. Essentially it is about removing features instead of widening the functionality. As such, SIM locks also served an example. With SIM locks, you cannot change your SIM card when, say, you are on holidays. More examples he gave were the region code of DVDs or copy restrictions on CD-ROMs. He was also referring to the Sony CD story from a couple of years ago when they infected buyers of their CD-ROMs or the Amazon fiasco where they deleted books on their reader devices. Essentially, these companies are trying to put the user into the back-seat when it comes to take control over your devices.
While protecting the owner of the computer sounds useful in a few scenarios, like with ATMs, it can be used against the owner easily, if the owner cannot exercise control over what the machine considers trusted. A way to counter this, he said, is to first simply not accept the fact that someone else is trying to limit the amount of control you can exercise over your machines. Another thing to do, according to him, is to ask for Free Software when you go shopping, like asking for computers with a pre-installed GNU/Linux system. I liked most parts of the talk, especially because of the focus on Free Software. Although I also think that for most parts he was preaching to the choir. But I still think that it’s important to remind ourselves of our Free Software mission.
Impressively enough, you can already watch most of the Videos! It’s quite amazing that they have already been cut and post-process so that we can watch all the things that we missed. I am especially looking forward to Christian’s talk on Builder and the Design session.
I really like going to GUADEC, because it is so much easier and more pleasant to communicate with people in-person rather than on low bandwidth channels such as IRC or eMail. I could connect my students with all these smart people who know much more about the GNOME stack than I do. And I was able to ask so many things I hadn’t understood. Let’s hope there will be GUADEC next year! If you are interested in hosting next year’s edition, you should consider submitting a bid!
On my travel back I realised that the Frankfurt Airport is running Ubuntu:
I want to thank the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my travel to GUADEC 2015.
