OStatic

This week, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit began accepting proposals for its upcoming event. The event, aimed at encouraging interaction between KDE's Akademy and GNOME's GUADEC developer conference attendees, gives prospective speakers the opportunity to bring their passion to a more diverse audience.

The GNOME and KDE projects recently decided that their upcoming developer events -- GUADEC and Akademy, respectively -- will be held simultaneously in the same location. Both projects hope this will foster communication and collaboration between their developer pools, and ultimately strengthen open source desktops.

The joint event, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit 2009, will be held July 3-11, 2009, in Gran Canaria (Canary Islands, Spain), and will be hosted by Cabildo, Gran Canaria's local government.

In October, I wrote about Camp KDE. This event was planned to complement Akademy, the traditional developer gathering for the KDE team, giving those unable to attend the former event (and specifically developers in the Americas) a better opportunity to gather and discuss projects.

Late last week, the Camp KDE 2009 presentation selections were announced. In addition to the presentations, the meeting will feature the traditional keynote addresses and birds-of-feather meetings.

The GNOME Foundation executive director, Stormy Peters, recently wrote a bit about why the focus on the KDE versus GNOME debate is not the real issue. Many commenters on her post agree (while others actively demonstrate) that it is counterproductive.

Peters says the driving force behind both projects is what matters -- and that is to offer choices between free and proprietary desktop environments. The notion that one desktop environment will ever exist that suits every user is likely a myth. Peters proposes that the goal is to build ever stronger free alternatives, and if the projects compete, it is more along the lines of teammates competing for a Most Valuable Player title. She highlights that getting developers from different projects to talk is one of the driving reasons behind GUADEC and Akademy being held simultaneously this year, in the same location, and why they are hosted by the same organizers.

The KDE project has announced the date and some detail regarding its first annual Camp KDE event. This developer conference was conceived at the KDE 4 Release Event that took place earlier this year in Mountain View, California, and aims to get developers all over the world more involved in the KDE project.