The Gran Canaria Desktop Summit has begun!
Our hackers enjoying some free beers paid by Canonical, damn I wish I was there. Credit: jcorrius cc-by flickr
If Microsoft wanted to destroy the FOSS desktop it would bomb Gran Canaria right now as the top hackers of both leading FOSS desktop environments, KDE and GNOME, are meeting there right now. But we all know Microsoft is no that evil, or are they? 
For the first time ever both GUADEC, the annual GNOME developers conference, and Akademy, the annual KDE developers conference, are being held at the same place and time. This will hopefully result in greater collaboration and interoperability between the FOSS desktops.
This special meeting has been titled the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit and it will feature many interesting and exciting talks. There were some really big names in the keynotes schedule including Richard Stallman, father of the free software movement, and Robert Lefkowitz, a really great speaker and a really respected and experienced man in the industry. Also in addition to the regular GUADEC and Akademy conference tracks there is going to be a special cross-desktop track. From looking over the talks there seems to be a lot of talks targeted at taking care of some old FOSS desktop issues. Also there are many talks that discuss new and exciting technologies and the innovations that will be made with them.
Also many big announcements of what is being planned for the future for the FOSS dekstop will be made there. Something quite shocking that was revealed already is that Nokia, the Finnish communications giant, plans to switch to Qt from GTK+ for its Maemo platform citing a desire to be more cross platform. This is a big win for KDE but quite a loss for GNOME. But something that will benefit both projects is Nokia’s announcement of further commitment to Linux, the FOSS desktop and FOSS in general.
“Our vision: To bring open source and Linux to mainstream consumers. Standard Linux and free desktop technologies optimized for finger touch UI. Direct contribution to the upstream projects. Code talks. Collaboration withing key open source communities.” –Source
It seems like Nokia is quickly becoming one of the biggest FOSS centered companies out there. Recently they open sourced the Symbian OS and relicensed Qt, which was already fully FOSS under the GPL, under the more liberal terms of the LGPL. Also they have opened up both platforms, which are recent Nokia acquisitions, for community development. Good for them. This demonstrates once again that going FOSS can lead to profits and be a good strategy for companies.
If you want to keep track of the latest announcements made in the conference keep track of the GNOME and KDE planets. Also most likely by the end of the conference the press will write some summaries of the highlights of the conference. If newinfo2day had payed me to go there I would have proudly covered the event but it seems like they are somewhat short on cash, you know, because of the economy But I will do the next best thing and I will keep track of what’s going just by using the Internetz 
In: Linux, Technology · Tagged with: con, foss, gnome, gran canaria, hackers, kde, nokia
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