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.
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.
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.
Posted on 07 Apr 2002