brussels, fosdem, what an amazing community!

Back from Brussels! I arrived back home yesterday night, coming back from a four-night-visit to Brussels. The first part was dedicated to a meeting with fellow researchers and some Open Source enterprises about a European research project that in the long run should improve KDE's quality of the source code, project management and other aspects of quality related to Open Source projects in general, and KDE specifically. If we can pull this off well, KDE can profit greatly from combined efforts of the European Union, research institutes and coorporations.

On friday, I took a couple of hours off from work for a walk through a part of Brussels city centre and a visit to the Atomium which has been renovated and re-opened only about a week ago. Nice.

FOSDEM (my photos) inofficially started with the annual beer event in "Roy d'Espagne", a nice café at the Grand Place in the heart of Brussels. Naturally, we kept "socialising" until deep into the night. After four hours of sleep, we went to the university to attend the keynote of RMS who talked about patents and made a couple of the usual jokes (GNU/Linux, png = png's not gif, you get the point). We skipped the last couple of minutes in favor of some fast food, though.

Later that day, I presented KDE's recent marketing efforts to the people that didn't fit into the room that was overcrowded with people interested in Xgl. I was delighted to see that people are actually very interested in the work that has been going on for the past months. My talk (slides) was received very well, and it started some lively discussion. After the talk, a couple of people came to me, stating that they are very happy about the things we're working on. Heck, I didn't really expect that kind of enthousiasm, but all the better of course.

Saturday night, we went out for Indian food, and didn't return to late to the Hostel where we had some beer and discussion. Didn't go to bed too late that night, since I was already lacking too much sleep. Sunday, KOffice day at FOSDEM brought us a wealth of knowledge and updates about KOffice. Bottom line: Krita is very nice and some features are extremely cool, such as embedding all kinds of office documents in others. Imagine embedding some spreadsheet into your photo, you're working on in krita. As soon as you click on the spreadsheet part in the image, krita switches into KSpread so you get all the features of that, same goes with KWord (and OpenDocument!). Oh, and my personal favorite: adjustment layers. That kind of nifty features add so much flexibility in your workflow. Aaah well, you should try it yourself! Bart (from the amaroK team showed us some of the new eye-candy of a recent svn-snapshot of amaroK, Ooooh, Aaaah, nifty!
KDE is an amazing project, getting new, extremely cool, useful and innovative stuff added everyday. I am very proud to be able to take part!

One thing though, some people might not be aware of the actual success of the KDE project, but the userbase of KDE is growing at an extremely fast pace. A personal guess would be that a couple of thousand new users a day is really not exaggerated, but of course we need some research there to get real figures. (We're working on that on the freedesktop promotion platform, though.)

• KDE rocks!
• Belgian road signs less so
• Leffe Blonde is excellent stuff
• Belgian waffles are delicious
• I can walk inside iron
• Xgl is hot, hot, hot

[ Mon, 27 Feb 2006 17:05:29 +0100 ] permanent link

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