Libre Graphics Meeting
Soon after joining the Inkscape developer's mailing list, I was
introduced to a conference called the Libre Graphics Meeting. In its
second year, the event was held in Montreal on May 4th through 6th at
�cole Polytechnique de Montr�al. Being from Ottawa, a mere two hour
drive away, I felt it was practically mandatory that I make the trip
to meet fellow Inkscape developers and learn a bit about the open
source world.
Andrew (my fiance) and I woke up at 5:45 a.m. on Friday morning.
Understand that, for software developers, this feels like the middle
of the night, so I was proud of Andrew for actually falling out of bed
on time. After some breakfast for me and coffee for him, we hit the
road. The drive was mostly easy, though the traffic in Montreal at
8:45 a.m. was slightly heavy, making our drive a bit longer than the
estimated two hours.
We quickly checked in to Les Studios H�tel and ran up the hill to the
conference building. We made it just in time for the first English
talk (many were in French), and one of the most interesting to Andrew:
"Why open standards matter: The Open Document Format." I will post
about this and other interesting talks later.
For most of the day Friday we listened to more talks, and then we went
back to the hotel to bring our stuff up to our room. I should really
put quotes around the word hotel because it was really more like a
jail that we paid to stay in. The room was tiny (even smaller than
expected), and the walls were concrete blocks that were painted white.
The bed was probably worse than sleeping on the floor. The things we
were supposed to put our heads on were the worst excuses for pillows
we've ever seen. Seemed more like folded up tarps with pillow cases.
As you can see, our room was rather depressing.
But enough belly-aching about that. We survived, and it was only
$50/night.
Besides, the view from the 15th floor wasn't so bad!
Thanks to the "Grand Souper" being held that night, time in the jail
cell was cut short. Some buffet food and a free glass of wine fueled
us as we chatted with Inkscape developers and some new friends from
other organizations. It was during this time that Andrew and I gained
the most insight into the open source world.
The remaining two days of the conference had fewer talks we were
interested in, so we took the opportunity to walk around downtown
Montreal, ensuring a stop at two of the many local brew pubs.
Andrew enjoys a liter of micro brew from the first brewpub we stopped
at.
My reflections on the open source side of things should come through
in later entries about the conference's talks, but I can sum the
experience up with one thought: Supporters of open source are nothing
if they are not passionate.
Posted by Gail at 1:35 PM 3 comments Links to this post
Labels: GSoC
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Google, Summer of Code, and Open Source Software
My name is Gail, and I'm an open source newbie.
Surprising for somebody who just graduated computer science? Perhaps,
but certainly not irreversible.
I'd heard of a few popular open source packages, including
OpenOffice.org, and even used Eclipse for many school projects, but I
didn't know much more about the world of open source than what the
die-hard fans in my class ranted about. Some of the key questions in
my mind included how people in open source made money and how the
projects are managed, given that most people never meet each other
face to face.
Enter Google Summer of Code.
In their FAQ section, Google states that one of the goals of the
Summer of Code program is to "inspire young developers to begin
participating in open source development." Perfect!
I found the ideal project thanks to one of my school friends (one of
the aforementioned die-hards). He knew that I liked graphic design and
CorelDRAW, so he suggested that I apply to work on Inkscape, an SVG
graphics editor.
My application is online on my portfolio website. I was accepted to
work on various improvements to the text tool, which, incidentally, is
also what I worked on at Corel during my co-op terms on the DRAW team.
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