{"id":1334,"date":"2006-02-27T18:05:29","date_gmt":"2006-02-27T16:05:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/2006\/02\/brussels-fosdem-what-an-amazing-community\/"},"modified":"2006-02-27T18:05:29","modified_gmt":"2006-02-27T16:05:29","slug":"brussels-fosdem-what-an-amazing-community","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vizZzion.org\/blog\/2006\/02\/brussels-fosdem-what-an-amazing-community\/","title":{"rendered":"brussels, fosdem, what an amazing community!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

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

On friday, I took a couple of hours off from work for a walk through a part of Brussels city
\ncentre and a visit to the Atomium<\/a> which has been
\nrenovated and re-opened only about a week ago. Nice.<\/p>\n

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

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

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

\n\tOne thing though, some people might not be aware of the actual success of the KDE project, but
\nthe userbase of KDE is growing at an extremely fast pace. A personal guess would be that a couple of
\nthousand new users a day is really not exaggerated, but of course we need some research there to get
\nreal figures. (We’re working on that on the freedesktop promotion platform, though.)\n\t<\/p>\n

\tBottom lines:<\/strong><\/p>\n