The Guadec (The Gnome Developers and Users Conference) conference in Sevilla is over.

What a great conference we had this year. We had four tracks of activities going on. Guadec has grown a lot from the first Guadec conference we had in Paris.

Various groups have developed around the project: the Anjuta developers had a strong presence. The Gnome Hispano group and various interest groups on specific areas of Gnome: Usability, Accessibility, training, project management and bug tracking.

Everyone had a lot of fun. The Gnome Hispano group beat the record for continous partying at a conference. Many new developers came to the conference for the first time, I was looking forward to meet Naba, and finally he made it to the conference.

Microsoft

It is obvious that Microsoft has no intention of correcting their behaviour as Steve Ballmer had promised: to act responsible, and do the right thing, given that Microsoft is a monopoly.

The new licensing changes to the CIFS specification are disturbing. It is disturbing because you would expect that a company the size of Microsoft that previously had competed by delivering what users wanted and improving their tools would do that, rather than depend on tricky licensing issues.

Attacking the GPL as a license is just a smokescreen for the fact that Linux, that little operating system *is* fulfilling the needs of big sectors of users without giving Microsoft a chance to compete.

Finally, I have been using Galeon has my web browser and it turns out that MSN and Hotmail no longer allow me to create new accounts using a plain Web Browser.

What is most striking is the fact that Microsoft does not envision a world where there are multiple software providers. They envision a word where they are the only source of software for horizontal applications.

patents

I have come to realize recently that if software patents continue, those countries that do not acknowledge them (for their bogosity) could become software development paradises.

Places where the software industry could still have a chance to compete without being hampered by artificial limitations.

Today was the meeting of the GNOME Foundation's Advisory Board. It was great to see everyone again at the conference. During lunch, I picked Keith's brain about the history of X (again, in my quest to dig more in the history of software than software itself).

The faith of OpenLook compared to Motif and how a consortium pushed for bad technologies to be adopted by technologies that were worst than what Sun and ATT had developed. Really interesting.

Jim and Keith were running beautifully configured X servers with anti-aliasing, apparently I had never correctly configured my system, because Keith later during the week fixed my X configuration and I have the best anti-aliased desktop (after installing GdkXft).

Evolution is so beautiful. It is a joy to read email with the anti-aliased, sub-pixel rendered fonts.

I met for the first time Don from HP. Also the Mandrake guys demostrated their `Tasks' feature that they incorporated from Debian: a very nice idea to simplify the use of Linux.

Fav-apps

I would love if Ximian would ship GnomeMeeting. I have been asking Nat for this for a few months, but so far I had no luck. At least it seems like we will be shipping the enhanced Mozilla that does anti-aliasing, because it is so beautiful.

I arrived to Sevilla at night. Vigu, Rocio and Juantom�s were at the airport to pick me up. Telsa had also arrived there.

Nat was in bed when we got to our hotel, and was as funny as always.

Mono 0.10 has been released.

Microsoft released Rotor, here is a link to the potential problems patent-wise.

I ran into Sam Ruby as he was arriving to the hotel today.

Later that night we went to have dinner organized by Dare Osbanjo (you might know him for his Java and C# comparission document). He got a group of really interesting people together: Joshua Allen, Paul Johns (Dr Gui) and Omri. I invited Lee Fisher.

We had a great evening. The dinner discussion was really interesting (specially the licensing and open source discussion), because we had some really smart people on the table. The fascinating part of this discussion is that we were passionate about what we believed in on both sides of the table, but both sides exposed some very interesting points. For example, there is the matter of forcing people to release their IP, which bothers people.

And just like it bothers me to not have source code, and not being able to change it, I could feel that we connected in terms of the fact that *forcing* you to release the code could bother other people on the same level. I still love the GPL, but I *can* understand much better the feeling if you watch it from the other side.

Sam has some great thoughts on the subject as well: he goes into a bit of depth on the topic of communities and the various "protections" in them.

Later on we explored a bit more of the archeology of .NET. In general, I have found that I do enjoy a lot the *history* of software projects and .NET is one of my favorite projects.

I spent the whole day on an airplane coming to Seattle.

I am almost done with `Blindness' from Jos� Saramago. An extraordinary book, I love the way this book is written. Thanks go to Alan for suggesting it.

fuji

My Fuji 6800 digital camera broke last week. It just started claiming `ERR CRD' and it would never recover. Am trying to get a replacement right now. But it is sad, because I will not get to take pictures of people in my trip and if I do not get a replacement on time, I will not have a camera by the time I go to Madrid in two weeks.

Today I talked about free software and open source on a video conference with the special commission on new technologies of the Spanish Senate.

The Europapress post.

A video is available here. Microsoft later charged against the GPL.

Paolo got the Mono C# compiler compiling itself on Linux finally. It has been a long week. Dietmar and Ravi have been fixing bugs everywhere.

Getting ready for the Jaguares concert tomorrow in Boston.

My new of new books from Amazon just arrived, `The Adapted Mind', `Plane Insanity' and `Manufacturing Consent'

With Nat in Orlando Florida. We went to Ben's wedding in Disney World. Some pictures are here.

Federico

Federico has been taking some amazing pictures.