Well, SCALE is over and I can only say that it was great. :) I got to
meet Scott Christley and I also got to meet the WindowMaker team.
They're all awesome people.
SCALE is a large conference. There
were a couple of thousand people there. We had about 150 people take
fliers from our booth and ask about GNUstep and we did get some of the
"So, when are you guys putting out the next version of WindowMaker"
questions. :) I told those people about what GNUstep was and sent them
to our friends at booth #37, which was the WindowMaker team.
I tried to emphasize a few things with the people who came by:
We're still alive and active
We're, first and foremost a cross-platform development evironment
We are following the Cocoa changes when we can and trying to maintain source compatibility with Cocoa and OpenStep.
I
showed them Gorm and ProjectCenter. I also showed them some
applications running on both GNUstep and on the Mac to illustrate
portability. Scott and I discussed that, for the next conference, we
want to have a DO demonstration and some more database applications to
show as well as Etoile. I did show them the Etoile website and told
people about both of our appearances on FLOSS Weekly (#44 and #56 for
those who haven't listened yet). Scott also had some suggestions about
how to improve things the next time around which I have taken to heart.
He said we should concentrate more on apps as well as emphasize our
development environment much more.
Most hard core developers
knew who we were right off the bat, some people still had us confused
with WindowMaker, but fixing that just took some explaining. Just the
simple act of being here was worth it just to educate people and to
make them aware of what's going on with GNUstep.
I was also
approached by someone from the LinuxFund who is intersted in helping us
to reach 1.0 and wants us to keep in touch with them.
We ended
the first day by having dinner with the WindowMaker team: John, Erin
and Kevin. We discussed the possibilities of more cooperation between
GNUstep and WindowMaker, specifically getting rid of WiNGS in
WindowMaker and replacing it with GNUstep.
I also got to meet
Randal Schwartz (author of a number of perl books and host on FLOSS
Weekly). The night before the conference I saw this:
I told him (jokingly) that I was tempted to make a post called "I can has Randal's 3G?" but I resisted the temptation. ;)
The
second day of the conference wasn't nearly as busy as the first. Sunday
seems to be a lot slower than Saturday at these things.
All in
all, I think the simple act of being there was a good thing for
GNUstep. I'm definitely planning on going to SCALE next year and, if
possible, other conferences which I can easily make it to in the
future. :)
-- Gregory Casamento Open Logic Corporation, Principal Consultant ## GNUstep Chief Maintainer yahoo/skype: greg_casamento, aol: gjcasa (240)274-9630 (Cell), (301)362-9640 (Home)
