Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/08/05/guadec.html

Conferences are often ephemeral. I’ve been going to
FLOSS
conferences since before there were conferences specifically for the
topic. In the 1990s, I’d started attending various USENIX conferences.
Many of my career successes can be traced back to attending those
conferences and meeting key leaders in the FLOSS world. While I know
this is true generally, I can’t really recall, without reviewing notes
from specific conferences, what happened at them, and how specifically it
helped me personally or FLOSS in general. I know they’re important to me
and to software freedom, but it’s tough to connect the dots perfectly
without looking in detail at what happened when.

Indeed, for most of us, after decades, conferences start to run
together. At GUADEC this year, I had at least two conversations of the
nature: What city was that? What conference was that? Wait, what
year was that?. And that was just discussions about past
GUADECs specifically, let alone other events!

For my part, after checking my records, I discovered that I hadn’t been
to a GUADEC since 2003. I’ve served as FSF’s representative on the
GNOME Advisory Board straight through from 2001 until today, but
nevertheless I hadn’t been able to attend GUADECs from 2004-2009. Thus,
the 2010 GUADEC was somewhat of a reintroduction for me to the in-person
GNOME community.

With fresh eyes, what I saw had great impact on me. GNOME seems to be
a vibrant, healthy community, with many contributors and incredible
diversity in both for-profit and volunteer contributions. GNOME’s
growth and project diversity has greatly exceeded what I would have
expected to see between 2004 and 2010.

It’s not often I go to a conference and am jealous that I can’t be more
engaged as a developer. I readily admit that I haven’t coded regularly
in more than a decade (and I often long to do it again). But, I usually
talk myself out of it when I remember the difficultly of getting
involved and in shepherding work upstream. It’s a non-trivial job, and
some don’t even bother. The challenges are usually enough to keep the
enticement at bay.

Yet, I left GUADEC 2010 and couldn’t see a downside in getting
involved. I found myself on the flight back wishing I could do more,
thinking through the projects I saw and wondering how I might be a coder
again. There must be some time on the weekends somewhere, I
thought, and while I’m not a GUI programmer, there’s plenty of system
stuff in GNOME
like dbus
and systemd;
surely I can contribute there.

Fact is, I’ve got too many other FLOSS-world responsibilities and I
must admit I probably won’t contribute code, despite wanting to. What’s
amazing, though, is that everything about GUADEC made me want
to get more involved and there appeared no downside in doing
so. There’s something special about a conference (and a community) that
can inspire that feeling in a hardened, decade-long conference attendee.
I interact with a lot of FLOSS communities, and GNOME is probably the
most welcoming of all.

The rest of this post is a random bullet list of cool things that
happened at GUADEC that I witnessed/heard/thought about:

• There was a lot of debate and concern about
  the change
  in the GNOME 3 release schedule. I was impressed at the community
  unity on this topic when I heard a developer say in the hall: The
  change in GNOME 3 schedule is bad for me, but it’s clearly the right
  thing for GNOME, so I support it. That’s representative of the
  “all for one” and selfless attitude you’ll find in the GNOME
  community.
• Dave
  Neary presented
  a very
  interesting study on GNOME code contributions, which he was
  convinced to release under CC-By-SA. The study has caused some rancor
  in the community about who does or does not contribute to GNOME
  upstream, but generally speaking, I’m glad the data is out there, and
  I’m glad Dave’s released it under a license that allows people to
  build on the work and reproduce and/or verify the results. (Dave’s
  also assured me he’ll release the tools and config files and all other
  materials under FaiF licenses
  as well; I’ll put a link here when he has one.) Thing is, the most
  important and wonderful datum from Dave’s study is that
  a plurality of GNOME contribution comes from
  volunteers: a full 23%! I think every FLOSS project needs a plurality
  of volunteer contribution to truly be healthy, and it seems GNOME has
  it.
• My talk on GPLv3 was reasonably well received, notwithstanding some
  friendly kibitzing
  from Michael Meeks.
  There had been push back in previous discussions in the GNOME community
  about GPLv3. It seems now, however, that developers are interested in
  the license. It’s not my goal to force anyone to switch, but I hope
  that my talk
  and my
  participation in
  this recent
  LGPLv3 thread on desktop-list might help to encourage a
  slow-but-sure migration to GPLv3-or-later (for applications) and
  (GPLv2|LGPLv3-or-later) (for platform libraries) in GNOME. If folks
  have questions about the idea, I’m always happy to discuss them.
• I enjoyed rooming
  with Brad Taylor.
  We did wonder, though, if the GNOME Travel Committee assigned us rooms by similar
  first names. (In fact, I was so focused that on the fact that we shared
  the same first name, I previously had typed Brad’s last name wrong
  here!) I liked hearing about
  his TomBoy online project,
  Snowy. I’m obviously delighted to see adoption
  of AGPLv3, the
  license
  I helped create. I’ve promised Brad that I’ll try to see if I can
  convince the org-mode community to use Snowy for its online storage as
  well.
• Owen Taylor demoed and spoke
  about GNOME
  Shell 3.0. I don’t use GUIs much myself, but I can see how
  GUI-loving users will really enjoy this excellent work.
• I met Lennart Poettering and
  discussed with him in detail
  the systemd
  project. While I can see how this could be construed as a Canonical/Red
  Hat fight over the future of what’s used for system startup, I still was
  impressed with Lennart’s approach technically, and find it much
  healthier that his community isn’t requiring copyright assignment.
• Emmanuele Bassi‘s
  talk on Clutter was
  inspiring, as he delivered heartfelt slide indicating that he’d overcome
  the copyright assignment requirements and assignment is no longer
  required by Intel for Clutter upstream contributions. I like to believe
  that
  Vincent
  Untz‘s, Michael
  Meeks‘ and my work on the (yet to be
  ratified) GNOME
  Copyright Assignment Policy was a help to Emmanuele’s efforts in
  this regard. However, it sounds to me like the outcome was primarily
  due to a lot of personal effort on Emmanuele’s part internally to get
  Intel to DTRT. I thank him for this effort and congratulate him on that
  success.
• It was great to finally meet Fabian
  Scherschel in person. He kindly brought me some gifts from
  Germany and I brought him some gifts from the USA (we prearranged it;
  I guess that’s the “outlaw” version of gifts). Fab also
  got some good interviews
  for the Linux Outlaws podcast that he does
  with Dan Lynch. It seems that
  podcast has been heavily linked to in the GNOME community, which is
  really good for Dan and Fab and for GNOME, I think.

That’s about all the random thoughts and observations I have from
GUADEC. The conference was excellent, and I think I simply must readd
it to my “must attend each year” list.

Finally, I want to thank the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my travel
costs. It allowed me to take some vacation time from my day job to attend
and participate in GUADEC.