The Montreal Summit 2011 turned out to be a very fun and productive gathering earlier this month of GNOME hackers and developers. With the 3.2 release behind us, there was a lot of discussion about the state of GNOME and its path going forward, reflected both in the technical and non-technical sessions that were held.
The group present went through all of the features for GNOME 3.3/3.4 and discussed kicking off the 3.3 cycle which tied in nicely with discussions currently underway on the mailing lists. There were presentations on Baserock by Lars Wirzenius, jhbuild by Colin Walters, and one on the application menu with canonical contributing a good chunk of code toward an improved application menu. A number of sessions talked about GNOME strategy, posing questions such as what are we building, who is it for and how do we get there. There were talks about building an OS, and the various complications that inevitably come up when you put together a system out of many evolving pieces. And Marina Zhurakhinskaya led a talk on how to improve and maximize GNOME’s participation in the Google Summer of Code program.
So much was going on that even though the event wasn’t huge there were many people there that I never even got the chance to talk to and I’m sure there was a lot accomplished that I don’t even know about (for example, Olivier Crete tells me that he made a fix to again allow the use of the free Theora codec for VoIP calls in Empathy). There were also some discussions around how quite a few of this year’s participants were involved in the GNOME Women's Outreach Program.
Many thanks to the sponsors who made this event possible!
By Karen Sandler, GNOME Foundation’s Executive Director
