GUADEC, Day Three
The third day was ‘User and Business’ day. Despite this worrying-sounding title, it actually turned out very good. There was a great keynote by a guy from DreamWorks whose name I have yet to be able to remember (sorry) including a fairly long clip from their new film ‘Madagascar’ which looks really rather worth seeing, especially as it includes a squad of crack penguin operatives (I bet he showed us that bit because he knew we’d like it). DreamWorks produce all their films using entirely Linux-based systems now — from GNOME desktops to Linux-powered render farms. They’ve got some criticisms, some things they’d like done, but overall they prefer it to the IRIX systems they used to use — and it’s significantly cheaper as well. How’s that for corporate support?
Oh, and Nokia are giving the GNOME Foundation the proceeds from some number of their groovy N770 tablet things. This appears to have caused some problems with some people because of their stance on software patents. On which there was an excellent talk yesterday, which far too few people attended.
The big news of the day they weren’t allowed to announce because the Internet got taken out of the building and so people couldn’t check if it was already public news. So this morning we all discovered that Novell have signed a huge deal with part of the US Government which will involve Linux desktops being deployed… running GNOME of course, since it’s Novell.
Oh and apparently the Chinese government have over 1,000,000 machines running GNOME. Wow.
Now I just need to amuse myself until I meet up with Daniel again, and then go to the airport to catch my flight home.