KLEPAS.ORG

This marks the first journal entry from Istanbul! I’ve been here in Turkey for the past week attending GUADEC, which for the whole part has been a blast. It’s as community-focused as LCA—the largest free software conference in the southern hemisphere—and thus a whole heap of fun.

GUADEC is the premier GNOME conference, held in a different European city every year, where developers and users alike chat about GNOME and generally party a lot. GNOME is a free desktop environment built on the GTK+ toolkit.

Some highlights include:

• meeting Hylke Bons (hbons), Andreas Nilson (andreasn) and Kalle Persson (kallepersson) for the first time face-to-face—we’ve known each other for a good year through the Tango Desktop Project—it’s great putting a face to an IRC nick;
• catching up and having dinner with a different group of like-minded, awesome and friendly people every night at various restaurants on the Bosphorus;
• the three-hour boat party sponsored by Collabora on Thursday evening;
• Federico Mena-Quintero’s talk on document-centric GNOME where he proposed a journal-based history application—although I disagree with the implementation it caused quite a buzz and got the ideas flowing;
• Catching up with Lennart Poettering and watching him haggling and forcing taxi drivers to bid each other down;
• post-GUADEC dinner under Lefty’s guidance at a Japanese restaurant followed by a water-pipe smoking session whilst sipping apple tea in a back-alley café in Taxim.

I fly out on Monday before heading to London for LugRadio Live with a day in between back in Frankfurt to rest and recover. Between doors until the 24^th—should be fun!

On a final note, the Tango Desktop Project icons have been re-licensed into the public domain. I’ll do a proper writeup in the coming days on the implications and what this means for developers and artists.