GUADEC 2014 in Strasbourg

This year, GUADEC took place in the lovely Strasbourg in France. It was really nice to attend the conference and to hang around with people who care about Free Software. In fact, the venue itself ran Debian which was nice to see 🙂

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend many of the great talks as I wasn’t available for all days. And when I was, I was busy meeting people. Although it felt smaller than the last GUADEC, I think I’ve never met so many people who I wanted to talk to.

The conference offered a two-track program. Interestingly many of them looking out for a future of GNOME. John Stowers gave one of the more important talks, I think. He was describing the situation in academia. Python is very popular in the scientific computing space, he said. He was not satisfied with JavaScript being the new “default” language for GNOME applications, because the contestants are numerous and powerful. So we would compete at least against the Web and Qt. The former apparently being nice on other platforms such as Windows. GNOME’s bindings, however, were very good, he said. The technological foundation is excellent and we should leverage that potential and make people use it. However, GNOME’s story on Windows is not all too good, he said. GTK+ is becoming more and more irrelevant and even Wx appears to be as popular as Gtk. I also heard others claiming that the Windows situation is a problem. What I don’t understand is whether there are technical problems blocking easy to use ports. Apparently introspected GNOME libraries for Pyhon on Windows exist, but I don’t understand why that doesn’t do the job.

Another talk related to the future of GNOME was given byAllan Day. In order for GNOME to be successful, amongst other things, a focus on quality must be established, he said. Various ways to improve the current release process were mentioned and the audience engaged in a vivid discussion. I don’t remember the detail so I hope this will be followed up and discussed more broadly in the GNOME community.

“Why do we do desktop”, asked Matthew Garrett in his presentation. When I read that title for the first time I thought the question of the desktop becoming irrelevant was being picked up. But that was not the case. Instead, he wanted GNOME to differentiate from the existing desktops which, as he claimed, are continuing to be simple multiplexors for running several programs (such as clocks) at the same time. In contrast to existing desktop, GNOME should become the secure desktop. Other desktops, he said, would only exist in order to sell more things to the user, i.e. to tie the user to an existing ecosystem. An advantage of GNOME is it being free from corporate control. Decisions are made very transparently which enables it to focus on brining privacy and security to the user. Even if the user is not aligned with our core values and principles. As such, every user deserves as much privacy and security as we can possible provide.

Many thanks to the local team for having organised the conference. I hope next year in Gothenburg will be at least as good.