The GNU Hackers Meeting 2008 brought together maintainers of GNU software from across Europe to discuss their work. The event was held in Bristol (UK) on the Thursday 10th and Friday 11th July. The two days included 8 talks and several discussion sessions, as well as a GPG key-signing session. The discussions continued in the evening at an official dinner, as well as unofficial dinners before and after the event. The meeting received financial support from NLNET Foundation, the Free Software Foundation and Code Sourcery.
The meeting was held at a business conference room in central Bristol. A digital projector and wireless internet access were provided, as well regular supplies of tea and coffee. Lunches were also provided at the venue. Most attendees arrived on Wednesday and stayed in University halls of residence, and others at nearby hotels. To keep organisation to a minimum, attendees had to make their own accommodation arrangements.
In total, 18 GNU maintainers attended from countries across Europe, including the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden and Czech Republic. The complete list of attendees was:
The meeting began with an introductory session where all participants broke up into small groups and introduced themselves to each other. By use of a precomputed set of permutations, the participants moved around such that each person met everyone else once and only once in the groups.
Over the next two days there were 8 talks, ranging from 30 minutes to 1 hour in length.
Described the recent work to add support for flexible debugging of multiple threads in GDB.
A summary of the motivation for the GNU PDF project and its current progress.
Recent and future developments in the Autotools suite.
The history of fonts and typography in free software,
A review of the major distributed version control systems, their advantages and disadvantages.
Described work porting the previously proprietary 'Dink' action game from Windows to GNU/Linux after it was released under the GPL.
Outlined work in progress on 'Epsilon' a functional language designed for multi-processor systems.
Demonstrated his work developing the interactive audio synthesiser Psycosynth. A 3d graphical user interface allows the user to manipulate waveforms and sounds to create music, and interact with other musicians over the network.
Videos of all the talks are available online (in OGG Theora format) at http://www.river-valley.tv/conferences/gnu_hackers_2008/. The videos are under a free license (CC-BY-ND). Thanks to Kaveh Bazargan of River Valley for recording the meeting.
An album of photographs of the meeting can be found at http://www.espontaneas.com/index/recientes/buscar/gnuhm2008
There were wide-ranging discussions about many aspects of the GNU project. The main topics were
Some suggestions in this area were:
The problem of sending mail (bug-reports etc) to other developers was raised, with some people mentioning messages being blocked or lost. It was pointed out that, ideally, members of different free software organisations and companies (GNU, Debian, etc) should be able to email each other without being blocked by spam filters, through some kind of global trust network.
The following diagrams show the web of trust between the participants before and after the meeting—there is a significant increase in connectedness. An arrow A -> B means "A signed B's key". The double-arrows A<->B (bold lines) indicate mutual cross-signatures between A and B.
| Before (2008-07-01) | After (2008-08-12) |
 |  |
Werner Koch was unfortunately unable to attend at the last minute but generously sent GPG smart cards for each person—so that they could be used to protect their maintainer's key. These were distributed with some information about using smart card readers, and a brief demo of the cards given.
The total budget for the meeting was approximately Ł1700 ($3400).
The meeting received sponsorship from NLNET Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, Code Sourcery and Network Theory Ltd. Details of sponsors were given in the attendees' conference folder, as well as verbally during the opening session.
The main expenses were venue hire and provision of food/refreshments.
Additional funding for Spanish participants was provided independently by GNU Spain.
| Funding | Amount (GBP) |
|---|---|
| NLNET (1000 EUR) | 773 |
| FSF (1000 USD) | 490 |
| Code Sourcery (500 USD) | 237 |
| Network Theory Ltd | 185 |
| Total | 1685 |
| Expenses | Amount (GBP) |
|---|---|
| Venue hire | 520 |
| Lunches (2 days) | 332 |
| Travel grants | 249 |
| Dinner | 207 |
| Refreshments (Tea & Coffee) | 152 |
| Equipment rental | 150 |
| Internet access | 60 |
| Office supplies | 15 |
| Total | 1685 |
| Attendee | Amount (GBP) |
|---|---|
| Ian Beckwith | 99 |
| Andrew John Hughes | 75 |
| Ian Jackson | 75 |
| Total | 249 |
Feedback for the event was very positive (based on comments at the end and email responses to a followup questionnaire). Everyone reported that meeting and talking to other GNU maintainers (usually for the first time) was very motivating for their work.
It was generally agreed that the GNU Hackers meeting should become an annual event. However, given the distance between the US and Europe, there would probably have to be separate European and American meetings as most people present would be unable to travel the the USA due to cost/time constraints.
Some suggestions received
A good feature of the event was that everyone present was an active GNU maintainer. However it was difficult to locate possible attendees beyond those subscribed to the internal GNU mailing lists. For future meetings, one suggestion was to use an invitation scheme -- maintainers could send an invitation to active contributors to their projects.
Date: 2008-08-14 12:15:24 BST
HTML generated by org-mode 6.06b in emacs 22