Reports from the GNOME summit

The distributed development model works very well for the open source community, but sometimes there's just no substitute for putting people together in a room to work on a project. The GNOME Summit held this past weekend in Boston did just that with 50 to 60 GNOME developers.

Since we were unable to attend in person, we did the next best thing and got the skinny on the Summit from two of the attendees, Luis Villa and Owen Taylor, both members of the GNOME Foundation Board. Villa said that about half of the scheduled time at the Summit was devoted to hacking and that a big focus of the Summit was to "get the juices flowing again, not listen to someone pound through PowerPoint slides."

Despite the heavy developer attendance, Taylor told us that the topic that drew the most interest was marketing. Villa said that there were three sessions on marketing, and that the group had come up with good ideas on what kinds of people they should be marketing to, and how to talk to those target markets. Villa mentioned that it was very important to market not just to users, but also to ISVs and developers to try to get those groups to develop products using the GNOME platform. Villa mentioned that GNOME hasn't always done the best at marketing its product, noting that other projects have gotten more press coverage for the same features:

For those interested, Villa's notes on marketing are posted to his website. It looks like the marketing discussions at the Summit have also spurred interest in reviving the GNOME marketing list.

Taylor led a session at the Summit on next generation rendering for GNOME based on Cairo and new technologies coming out of X.org

Villa said some of the discussions covered usability, integration with X.org, and "administrative stuff" including a possible move away from CVS for the GNOME project. Taylor said there were also good discussions on hardware integration, control center reorganization and D-BUS. Since only a small number of GNOME developers were at the Summit, Villa said there was "a lot of discussion about the directions the project will be taking" but concrete decisions will be deferred to until the discussions can be taken to the GNOME lists.

We were hoping that the Summit would provide a clear picture of what to expect in the next release of GNOME, but Taylor said it's really too early to say what features will be in GNOME 2.10:

Villa also said it would be hard to predict exactly what would be in the next release, but did throw out a few hints:

One feature that was heavily discussed at the conference that might be in the next release is Beagle. The Beagle project, not yet officially part of GNOME, is a tool for indexing various forms of data, including mail, web pages, Instant Messaging, and integrating search into the desktop.

Villa compared Beagle to Apple's Spotlight and the search technology that is reported to be in Microsoft's "Longhorn" release. Villa says the name doesn't have any specific significance, except that "it's about sniffing out things, finding things". Villa also told LWN that Beagle isn't tied to "official" GNOME applications, and will work with a variety of applications. "If you only talk to the official GNOME browser, mail client, you're locking out a lot of people. This approach is a little more flexible".

Readers interested in following Beagle development can turn to the Planet Beagle blog.

Both Taylor and Villa said that the Summit was a success. Taylor noted that he was happy to be able to pull in 50 or 60 developers when the Summit was announced just a few weeks in advance of the event:

Villa also mentioned that the Stata building where the Summit was held was "an incredible place to gather", and the photos from the event certainly support that. Links to photos from the conference can be found on the Summit website.