This week I'm in Helsinki at my first DebConf (although its the fifth one for many of the people in this picture)
Another great grass-roots project conference is this DebConf. Had a fine dinner with some of the leaders of the mother project (and its many famous and less famous distros). Very interesting to try to figure out all of the subtextual connections and history between and around all of it. I'm feeling a bit like Rip Van Winkle, waking up after a few years (since I considered Debian very deeply) to discover a lot has changed.
I also have been noticing the many lovely Debian Women wandering around this conference, and I just subscribed to their mail list. I like the proactivity of their involvement in this community very much. There are more women (and they are mostly well-informed on technical issues) than I'm used to encountering at FOSS conferences.
We just watched Mark Shuttleworth speak to most of the conference attendees about Ubuntu and the impact he believes it is having on Debian. The Q&A went far into the lunch break, its clearly a big topic. Interestingly enough Mark was partially there to debunk rumors resulting from his announcement last week about endowing a Foundation to preserve Ubuntu. He believes he's set it up and funded to last for "at least a technology generation".
This has me thinking, because last night at dinner Mark, B'Dale Garbee and I were talking about "How long we think it will take for FOSS software to take over". Mark thought it would take a whole generation. The nice lady who happened to be sitting next to us thought that maybe technology adoption cycles were compressing and that there was a shorter generation than the one we usually mean when we say generation (defined by the human reproductive cycle)...she said that Grandparents are learning from their Grandkids about technology now. Certainly that's happened to my Mom.
The last thing Mark said to me last night was that he thought I'd like spending time getting to know the Debian community. So far, so good :-)
Cool to hear the DebConf is going well. It is happening only couple kilometers from where I sit, but unfortunately we need to finish the first release of OpenPsa 2.x (http://www.openpsa.org)
Posted by: Henri Bergius | July 14, 2005 at 05:58 AM