Jul 9
2009

So I’m writing this from my N800 at the airport, thinking about the event that happened at Gran Canarias this week. This last day there were mostly talks about the local community in spain. The first talk were abput the Telecentros in Brazil. I was interested about the technical talks but it was really more social. This talk focused about the use of Gnome on this telecentros. But also the way it improves people lives.

The earlier night I got to spend a more serious talk with Alberto who were sharing the rather large hotel room that I got. We went out to get some food and resulted on a great talk about how FLOSS in Europe and Spain is growing and dealing with Microsoft. From the legal point of view as well as the techical one.

Alberto was one of the key pieces against the OOXML / ISO debacle. He also has recently been fighging the issues about the laptop on education and whenever they will carry Linux or Windows.

I also had the chance to meet Federico Mena, a fellow mexican that is a very proficient developer. Our talk was focused around the news related about Oracle and Sun buying and how would it affect the community. Most of the conversation drifted into who controls the technological agenda in OOo.

Then had some more chattering with Frank from KDE and about the social factors and aplication within openoffice.org. Since it seems that Frank really wants to innovate on this area. But we also realize that the roadblocks are many and we need to be very autocritical and protect the users.

We agree on continuing implementing something easy and mainteinable without duplicating the other applications and also define if you want it to connect with the community or with other people.

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Jul 7
2009

Today we had a nice day with lots of conversations happening at the Gran Canarias Desktop Summit. More conversation about the ODFkit which also gave us our need to understand webkit better. Also an alternative idea is basically understand ODFpy and go through that route. This will allow us lower our cost of design, and basically just change it to a port.

However now there are three ways:

  • Implement ODF the webkit way
  • Do a port from ODFpy to C and optimize it for speed
  • Create a libODF from scratch with optimization in mind

Any of this implementation could become a foundation to develop more ODF tools and make it more accessible for everyone.

The other parts of the day were pretty awesome, involved the review of interesting technology from freedesktop called Telepathy and farsight.

This technology can greatly push the agenda for both collaboration and social desktop.

At the end of the day I finally met with Luis Cabrera and attended the issues within Ecuador development of an universal dictionary for multiple languages. This will allow and open the contribution as well as have more efficiency.

We even went on to record a podcast about the issues that we’ll distribute in private ways with the rest of the team. We are looking forward to restart development.

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Jul 6
2009

Having Guadec and Akademy at the same place always seemed like a great idea and pulling it together has proved that it was indeed a great idea.

As an OpenOffice.org community member I feel truly honored to be at this event and see so much forward thinking about using open source, free software and open standards to push forward society and innovate.

Nobody is talking about imitating the commercial equivalent, at least when talking about technologies. Nor there is people that seems that a good idea is to keep doing what works.

This is a great fertile soil ground to innovate and come up with propositions about business, development, use cases, and just share bold daring opinions.

Yet everyday is a party and having creative juices all over can lead to maybe some exhaustion and just take the night off to sleep. However the way things have been advancing I really wish we could make more of this events with more inclusiveness.

The event has been great and the people I have meet has been outstanding. To be honest I knew some of these people before, they are fun, easy to talk to and very very geeky.

I enjoyed having them around again and sharing experiences on what can happened to OpenOffice.org and the general desktop. The most important points that this event has raised so far is the Semantic applications and the social desktop.

Gnome people on the other side were more concern with Gnome 3.0 and more underlining technology like Freedesktop and GnomeShell. Media applications and just having a more appealing desktop experience. Not saying that they weren’t embrassing innovation, but much on a different fashion.

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