"There is a serious plus in being at the desktop conference of the year. The article about cross-desktop collaboration might already have hinted at some of the advantages of this joint meeting. Many of the get-togethers and talks about collaboration have yet to bear fruit - only time will tell which ones will turn up interesting results and which ones will fade away. The seeds have been planted, and there is room for more. Most developers you speak with here will either like the joint meeting because of the opportunities they see or not mind it much because it does not really touch them. Negative voices are few and far between, at least on the KDE side, and even those who do not value the cross-desktop cooperation see advantages in this larger meeting.
"One of those advantages is the number of teams and talks about topics you usually do not encounter at Akademy. Maemo would most likely have been at Akademy next year, but the new approaches to user interfaces by the Moblin team or the work of the Zeitgeist and GNOME shell developers offers interesting perspectives to graphical and technical design. Many developers have therefore expressed interest in having more Free Software communities joining us next year, such as LXDE, XFCE and Android."
