Libre Graphics Meeting in Brussels was a great event. The Oyranos project and a OpenICC meeting where a second time present. The last LGM for me was in Wroclaw two years ago, which was great as well.
This years organisation team managed the expectations very well. The location was really a place of inspiring creativity. The food where nice prepared north african dishes. I enjoyed the vegetarian mixture for these couple of days, as it tents to keep the head free and attention high.
The one track talks worked very well and we will enjoy the recordings of the whole track due to this session layout. The short presentations gave occasions for statements and many nice ideas. Surrounded by Birth of Feather (BoF) and workshops it was a nicely working mixture. And of course the discussions continue as well after LGM on public email lists and in private emails.
The colour management BoF took place on Friday. My notes for the OpenICC BoF session will go to the create and OpenICC email lists soon. We had a nice meeting around colour for the open source operating systems and desktops. Various projects where present like Scribus, Adobe, W3C, Ghostscript, Krita, GCM and Oyranos. The session served to inform and exchange with people around colour management concepts, directions and issues. Even if I had expected more projects to take part, I have seen great interest in colour around. Colour Management was considered as well in the OpenRaster BoF. There was a workshop around cameraRAW colour management and I learned in more detail how it works, which was very interesting.
The Blender project got really a financial impact and more projects target at gaining resources by turning their ideas into financial concepts. Thats a great sign, as it will allow to allocate more resources to the development of these open source projects. Blender had the great money collection to buy the code base for the project and release under a OSI license. Krita obtained much community sponsoring to pay now one developer for several months. Jon Philips talked about his commercial open source activities.
What I hope is that the mixture of various project concepts for the whole libre graphics development keeps open. Ending in a commercial mono culture just with open source strategies would not satisfy. What I really like in this community is the mixture of full time commitment and occasional contributions. There came many surprises to me by people, who seemingly have low commercial interests in their software, but seek ways to express their ideas and just want to evolve in this. I hope the mixture keeps alive as a base for a lively and creative spirit.
Many presentations where this year held by artists. That gave a very nice insight on how projects are driven by user demand. Just hire developers and let them implement, what users want, is a interesting concept. I am pretty sure this concept has limitations to complex software, but the directness of expression is amazing. It shows as well how users are actual enabled to implement their ideas by the means of existing technology. With future developments in web technology like HTML5, I expect to see more of that type of activities. A really great direction.