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@Fusspawn meant 600W. See this is how I got that 1KW thing in the first place. big numbers are better.

Wednesday, October 08 2008

software freedom day

A few weeks ago i was at software freedom day in baarn. I would link to the website, but apparently there are some problems, it used to be at www.softwarefreedomday.eu but it appears to be down now. Anyhow, as you might know, software freedom day is the celebration of freedom in software around the world. Bas de Lange organised one the dutch parties this year, where he manages to fill the day with all kinds of talks about all the wonderful free projects we have here in the netherlands and around the world.

After a short meet and greet and introduction speech from bas, the day started off with a talk about the vision and future of KDE by Jos Poortvliet. Because of time constraints he couldn't go into much of the eye-candy that KDE 4 brings us, but his talk was smooth and showed a lot of shared ideals and visions that are present in the GNOME community.

Next up was myself. Last year i talked about '10 years of gnome', celebrating the fact that gnome has a long and interesting road behind itself. This year however i chose to speak about 'The year of the gnome desktop'. I tried to answer the question using some available adoption figures, and after that, questioned the question itself. Because the question simply can't be answered, at least not when reading articles that sport the question in their title. If you would look back at articles written in 2003, all the reasons why linux/gnome isn't ready for the desktop yet, are all taken care of. But they simply keep thinking up new reasons why linux hasn't been adopted yet. Which in my opinion, is a explanation of a different question. I then ended the presentation with a commerical from novell

To tell you the truth however, it didn't really go that well. The presentation and idea behind it where solid, however my preparation was sub-par. I hope the people didn't notice it that much, but i had a few bad moments and also lost track of time. I actually thought i had only been speaking for 5 minutes when one of the organisers alerted me that my half hour was almost done.

What i was very happy about was the presentation itself though. I tried to avoid putting too much information on the sheets and instead focused on the story. This actually avoided the whole "looking at the sheets to see what i should be talking about" effect. I will try to put up the presentation as soon as i have time. I could do it now, but because the sheets are empty without the story it would be a waste of both of our time.

After my talk, in the obligatory question round, we got a nice little discussion about increasing adoption/awareness rates for linux/gnome. I also spoke about this with Jos for a bit. grassroots telling your neighbour about it, and getting those IT companies that serve the small business to take a look at linux as a valid alternative.

Because of the discussions, i missed the talk about GNUradio, i talked to Martin afterwards, and was pretty much blown out of the water for the scope that the project had. Their software enabled everything that does radio, and when they say radio they mean waves and not just music radio. Apparently they can also tackle things like radar and wifi.

All in all, it was a fun day, i found out about some projects it didn't know of before and met some new people in the dutch open source world.