Last weekend, the Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) gathered developers, users and designers representing all of the major free graphics applications like Blender, the GIMP, Inkscape, Krita, Scribus and many more. The conference, now in its third year, was held at Wroclaw University of Technology in Poland, which you may remember as one of our top ten universities for Google Summer of Code™ 2008. Two former Summer of Code students, Michael Dominic Kostrzewa and Pawel Solyga, attended the meeting and were kind enough to send us their impressions of the conference.
Pawel, Co-Founder of the Natural User Interface Group and one of their mentors for Summer of Code this year, gave us some general background on the meeting:
The purpose of the LGM is to allow developers from diverse projects to collaborate, share ideas and code, co-operate on cross-application standards, and simply get to know one another. It is
also a great place to get feedback from live end users and artists, all of who are considered an integral part of the conference. We also had a chance to watch the pre-screening of the Peach open movie project's Big Buck Bunny on the local cinema big screen. As usual, LGM was free to attend, open to all and a useful three days for everyone involved.
Michael adds:
At LGM, key members of the community presented the current state of their projects and talked about future developments. Software packages ranging from font-design applications to digital publishing were demoed. The most interesting topics included vector-based sketching using tablets. Thanks to the latest code in the Inkscape project artists can create scalable, fully editable pen-alike renderings with same quality and feeling as traditional raster-based canvas. Another highlight was Krita - an application using advanced physical model to simulate the look & feeling of real-world brushes and paints.
The Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 was a nice, successful event. It was exciting to see designers and coders talking to each other, sharing visions & ideas.
Have you been working on a cool open graphics project or were you one of the attendees of LGM? As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts on the conference or the coolest new work you've produced using FOSS tools.
