By Brian Proffitt
Managing Editor
Day two begins. The men are in good sprits for their mission
ahead, and anticip–whoops, wrong article.
For those of you wondering where the pictures are for this trip,
it seems I am having trouble setting up a VPN tunnel out through
this hotel’s ISP, which is the only way to get image content up on
LT’s server. I will keep trying; one of the conference participants
has a solid proxy link out from his laptop, and he offered to let
me borrow the connection. If need be, I’ll create a trip album when
I get back home.
Last night, I went to dinner with several of the conference
attendees and speakers, including Jono Bacon and John Terpstra. I
consider John to be a good friend, and if you ever get a chance to
talk to him, he will most assuredly lend you insights on what needs
to be done in many aspects of open source. When he tells you
though, it’s not done in an insulting manner. John is very very
passionate about open source and wants it to succeed both
technically and personally.
Jono’s precence at the dinner allowed me pay compliments to his
articles over on O’Reilly and to follow up on his session talk
yesterday regarding desktop development. Jono, who has developed
for both KDE and GNOME, strongly believes that there is too much
duplication of effort in the two desktop camps, and more unified
work should be done.
It should be clarified that he is not advocating the the
unification of the desktops. Rather, on certain levels under the
desktop, there are projects that separately solve the same problem
from each desktop environment. These projects, Jono argues, should
be moved to the free desktop, and not be handled individually by
GNOME and KDE.
For what it’s worth, I think he’s right. Both GNOME and KDE have
their advantages and disadvantages. (Hey, I’m no Linus Torvalds, I
remain neutral. Neutral! Neutral!!) But there can be some
unification of effort and still maintain the choices that so many
free software users desire.
Off to breakfast and the morning sessions. More later.