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Mon, 20 Oct 2008

/xLife/China/Beijing/OpenSource: Gnome Asia Summit[1] in Beijing

I just attended what I think was my first Open Source conference. Hard to believe I have been an open source zealot for so long and this is my first conference.... As it happens, maybe because of the Beijing Olympics, maybe because the Open Source community is experiencing massive growth in China, this is just the first of several such events in Beijing over the next few months.

I have to say a conference like this is a fun, informative, and highly motivating experience. It really does leave one with a strong desire to find a project and start coding, like yesterday. It probably also helps that the event was super-well-organized, and most of the presenters were quite interesting.

One of the things I learned this past weekend is that the Open Source community and the commercial world are in a highly symbiotic relationship. Fully 40%(!!) of the work done on Open Source projects is done by paid employees of companies that operate in the Open Source space. Which of course explains why there are so many eager sponsors[2] for this kind of conference: they want to recruit more free labor for their projects by helping to build a vibrant Open Source community around them. It would seem like a truly win-win situation, and perhaps explains why many companies are moving towards the Open Source model. (Of course, Sun Microsystems[3] is the poster child for this trend....)

The sponsors flew in a number of executives and senior engineers from around the world to talk to us. The event was free, the facility first class, lunch was good and also free, and there were some quite lavish prizes raffled-off at the end of every day (starting with a laptop....) I felt quite pampered.

Another really interesting tidbit I picked up was the vast increase in Firefox usage in the past couple of years. If I recall the graph clearly, Firefox users went from single digit millions to over 100 million during that period. Obviously most of those are Windows users.

And I switched my window environment from KDE to Gnome[5]. Gnome really seems to be becoming the standard, so I really think I should get better acquainted with it.

Here are some pictures from the event[4].

[1] http://www.gnome.asia/
[2] http://www.gnome.asia/en/sponsor/
[3] http://www.sun.com/
[4] http://flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=gnomeasia&m=text
[5] http://www.gnome.org/

posted at: 05:39 | path: /xLife/China/Beijing/OpenSource | permanent link to this entry

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Mon, 20 Oct 2008