Boston Summit in Not Boston2 min read

This week-end:

• Trapped Olivier Crète and Guillaume Desmottes into fixing their stack to make video/audio calls work again in Empathy 3.2
• Spoke at length with Robert Ancell at the Collabora party on Sunday.
• Good to have an elaborate counter-argument to Matthew Garrett’s famous rebuttal of LightDM: it seems that Robert wishes to make it a compelling-enough replacement for gdm (and all the others) before bringing it up again; in other words, bring the living proof of the superiority of your replacement, such that there are pratically no more reasons for upstream not to adopt it. We will see how this pans out in the next few cycles, it should be interesting.
• It was a pleasure to discuss  various fashionable subjects of recent times such as the strategic positioning of Canonical/Ubuntu, turning points in the type of userbase (I forgot what exact terminology he used, but to me it basically translated to leaping over a ravine with a giant rocket-propelled lobster), CLAs, Pitivi, etc.
• Managed to catch Karen Sandler, discuss the workings of the GNOME Foundation and the challenges to face in dealing with project-specific funds. Impressed by her background and moved by her personal story; she literally embodies down to her very heart the struggle of free vs proprietary software.
• Briefly discussed the women outreach program with Marina. Hopefully I’ll find some time soon to write a dedicate blog post to invite participants to get in touch with the Pitivi project.
• Hung around with Stéphane, Nohemi, and many others I’m forgetting to mention here. A bit sad I could not follow them onto a leisurely walk in the old town yesterday, I had to go back to the venue to continue investigating bugs in Empathy.
• I’m not entirely convinced that file transfers work correctly with gtalk and jabber accounts. They sometimes work, sometimes don’t (it seems to vary wildly with huge combinations of version numbers, account types, network/router types, etc.)… one thing I’m very certain of is that I haven’t seen them working reliably in years, and I always have to apologize to friends for that.
• Ate a lot of apples and mandarines
• Took absolutely no pictures or videos, for a change.

All in all, it seems to me that the atmosphere this year was the same as last year. I did not know what to expect from a smaller attendance at first, but I’m happy of the outcome and I’d definitely like for more events such as the “Boston Summit” to happen in Montréal.