LiMo Foundation Blog

The Gran Canaria Desktop Summit is one of the major free and open source community events this year. Up until 2009, the GNOME desktop developers had the GUADEC conference, and the KDE developers had the AKaDEmy conference, in separate locations at different times. In order to provide greater opportunities for cross-desktop discussions, collective work on shared components, and general community building, it was decided to have both conferences at the same time, co-located in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. This year's conference(s) attracted over 1000 attendees, not just coders, but localizers, writers, marketers, legal experts, artists, photographers, and users who want to share feedback and talk to the people making the software they use.

Conferences like GUADEC and AKaDEmy (and FOSDEM, and LinuxTag, and a host of others, large and small, general and specialized, around the globe), are long-standing traditions. Some, like the Linux Symposium, the oldest of the community conferences, have an academic air, jury papers for inclusion and publish proceedings. Most are a lot more informal, but all include a combination of a series of presentations, demos, unstructured "birds of a feather" sessions on specific topics of shared interest, "lightning talks" (5 minute, single-topic presentations), some parties in the evenings and a lot of time and space to work on coding, designing, discussing and meeting other people face-to-face.

The Desktop Summit was the first time that the LiMo Foundation was officially represented at a community conference. Andrew Savory, Technology Project Manager from the LiMo Foundation office attended, as did I, both as ACCESS' Director of Open Source Technologies and as the Foundation's Open Source Committee chair; engineers from Foundation member companies attended as well. In addition to attending many of the more mobile-related presentations and talks, Andrew and I participated in the "GNOME Mobile" meeting, where we discussed—along with as many as 60 other participants—the increasing use of open source code in mobile devices of all kinds, precisely the sort of direction which LiMo has been fostering and promoting, and is executing on with the recently announced reference implementations being used by Foundation members for ongoing development.

As a member of the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board, I also had the opportunity to update other Foundation Board members of the progress which the LiMo Foundation has made to date, and our upcoming plans, and there is general agreement that we'll be coordinating our efforts more closely in the future.

Less formally, Andrew and I had many opportunities to meet developers on projects and components used in LiMo devices, things like GTK+, Gstreamer, BlueZ, D-Bus and other components. We got the opportunity to explain what LiMo is about, and answer questions about the direction of the Foundation, in a "grassroots" way.

Broadening and deepening such coordination and communication is a clear ongoing direction for the Foundation, as is increased interaction with, and support of, the open source development community. The reference implementations in use by Foundation members contain upwards of 70% open source, community-developed-and-maintained code, and these are the people with whom the Foundation works, collaboratively, to develop and deploy code now shipping on dozens of devices from Foundation members. We all have things to teach and things to learn from one another, and conferences like the Desktop Summit are key opportunities for the LiMo Foundation to engage with the open source development community.