LAS 2018
This month I was at my second Libre Application Summit in Denver. A smaller event than GUADEC but personally was my favorite conference so far.
One of the main goals of LAS has been to be a place for multiple platforms to discuss the desktop space and not just be a GNOME event. This year two KDE members, @aleixpol and Albert Astals Cid, who spoke about release cycle of KDE Applications, Plasma, and the history of Qt. It is always interesting to see how another project solves the same problems and where there is overlap.
The elementary folks were there since this is @cassidyjames home turf who had a great “It’s Not Always Techincal” talk as well as a talk with @danrabbit about AppCenter which are both very important areas the GNOME Project needs to improve in. I also enjoyed meeting a few other community members such as @Philip-Scott and talk about their use of elementary’s platform.
Heather from Purism spoke about the Librem 5 status which I’m excited for but has a way to go. It was great to get an opportunity to meet her since we’ve spoken online about their interest in Flatpak and GNOME-Builder.
There were some fantastic talks discussing FOSS usage at a broader level:
- “FreeHive: An Open-Source Creative Agency” and “Developers, Developers, Developers—How About Creatives?” - Ryan Gorely
- “How Can You Make Your Open Source Project Attractive to Students?” - Heidi Ellis and Gregory Hislop
- “Research Science and Libre Computing” - Britt Yazel
As always there was a big Flatpak presense and throughout we had the opportunity to discuss things like adding Qt to fdo, tracking runtime CVEs, sandboxing WebKitGTK, etc. We also had a Flatpak BoF on the last day discussing things like possibilty of selling apps and infrastructure improvements.
I really enjoyed the event overall and look forward to future LASes. Next week I will be in A Coruña, Spain, for the webengine hackfest.