Monday, February 23, 2009

SCALE Progress Report

Well, SCALE is over and I can only say that it was great. :) I got to meet Scott Christley and I also got to meet the WindowMaker team. They're all awesome people.

SCALE is a large conference. There were a couple of thousand people there. We had about 150 people take fliers from our booth and ask about GNUstep and we did get some of the "So, when are you guys putting out the next version of WindowMaker" questions. :) I told those people about what GNUstep was and sent them to our friends at booth #37, which was the WindowMaker team.

I tried to emphasize a few things with the people who came by:
  1. We're still alive and active
  2. We're, first and foremost a cross-platform development evironment
  3. We are following the Cocoa changes when we can and trying to maintain source compatibility with Cocoa and OpenStep.
I showed them Gorm and ProjectCenter. I also showed them some applications running on both GNUstep and on the Mac to illustrate portability. Scott and I discussed that, for the next conference, we want to have a DO demonstration and some more database applications to show as well as Etoile. I did show them the Etoile website and told people about both of our appearances on FLOSS Weekly (#44 and #56 for those who havent' listened yet). Scott also had some suggestions about how to improve things the next time around which I have taken to heart. He said we should concentrate more on apps as well as emphasize our development environment much more.

Most hard core developers knew who we were right off the bat, some people still had us confused with WindowMaker, but fixing that just took some explaining. Just the simple act of being here was worth it just to educate people and to make them aware of what's going on with GNUstep.

I was also approached by someone from the LinuxFund who is intersted in helping us to reach 1.0 and wants us to keep in touch with them.

We ended the first day by having dinner with the WindowMaker team: John, Erin and Kevin. We discussed the possibilities of more cooperation between GNUstep and WindowMaker, specifically getting rid of WiNGS in WindowMaker and replacing it with GNUstep.

I also got to meet Randal Schwartz (author of a number of perl books and host on FLOSS Weekly). The night before the conference I saw this:



I told him (jokingly) that I was tempted to make a post called "I can has Randal's 3G?" but I resisted the temptation. ;)

The second day of the conference wasn't nearly as busy as the first. Sunday seems to be a lot slower than Saturday at these things.

All in all, I think the simple act of being there was a good thing for GNUstep. I'm definitely planning on going to SCALE next year and, if possible, other conferences which I can easily make it to in the future. :)

35 comments:

Randal L. Schwartz said...

Yeah, you saw my jailbroken iPhone 3G running the AppleShare over IP protocol. Luckily, I've changed my root and mobile password, or you'd be mounting my iphone as a disk. :)

It was nice to meet you. The show was definitely a lot of fun... it'll take a couple of days to recover now.

GregC said...

It was nice meeting you as well. :)

This was my first trade show and now, unfortunately for me, I'm addicted. I think I'll be attending more. I heard from the people who were in the booth across from me that there's one in their home town in Ohio in the fall. I may go. :) Gareth has been asking me to get GNUstep out there for about 2 years now. I'll have to thank him later for infecting me with this virus.

What I found that is really cool is the networking aspect of it since, as a geek, I'm socially inept. You get to know a ton of other people who have the same deep and abiding interest in open source, which is always an awesome thing.

It's definitely going to take me a few days to readjust my sleep schedule.

Unknown said...

I was also approached by someone from the LinuxFund who is intersted in helping us to reach 1.0 and wants us to keep in touch with them.

What would reaching 1.0 mean?

GregC said...

There is a roadmap on our wiki at:

http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/Roadmap

Finishing all of those would give GNUstep the polish it needs to be considered 1.0.

GC

tatva said...

Heads up people,
don't let GSoC rejection trouble you (how stupid of them).
GnuSTEP is already 1.0 in my opinion
(well maybe rc1)
what it needs is an easy installer (maybe incl dependencies)
a unified release cycle (the current model is irrational) (base, back and gui seem ok to you but a real user would only need gnustep_system + gnustep_apps to get going)
a modern theme (run a donation sprint on that i'll contribute
(if we have to pay a designer that is))
coord with etoile.it is a really important project and i really like their 1dev-1usr release model (although a user-oriented release is still a dream)
more support from gnu(is this or is it not a long term thing?)
the most important thing right now is ease of testing. perhaps an ubuntu minimal live system ready to go, or 1.0 meta-packages for all major platforms(major linux, all BSDs, win)
that would bring a first user base-casual devs, such as i, who would in turn bring casual users in.
the road of free software is taken step by step, but
this is not the time to hassle
it is the time to STOMP

excuse my dyslexiait shows up in every post, everywhere, just make an 1.0 release now, upon etoile and others can build and have it incorporated in ubuntu (ubuntuSTEP?)
it seems to me the leader(u) has to catch on

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