We’re Back from Libre Application Summit 2018

Sharing Knowledge and Wisdom in Denver, Colorado

This past week elementary contributors Daniel Foré, Felipe Escoto, Blake Kostner, and I met up in Denver, Colorado for the Libre Application Summit. We joined a few dozen people from GNOME, KDE, and other projects with a mission to share knowledge and experiences, plus collaborate on common technologies for app ecosystems built on open source technologies.

The event was three days of talks and impromptu hacking, plus one day of BoFs (birds-of-a-feather meetings, based around a common interest) and hacking. And then after the official event there was another impromptu day of exploring the mountains of Colorado.

Talks

Talks in the large common area

Some of the talks were expanded or iterated versions of talks we attended at GUADEC, which wasn’t a bad thing. It was nice to check up on the progress of technologies like Flatpak (including a much deeper dive into the technical side) and FreeDesktop-SDK. There was also a strong focus on design and UX, helped in large part by the presence of and talks by Robin Tafel from Endless and Ryan Gorley from FreeHive.

We also gave two talks. I presented It’s Not Always Technical: Solving Social Problems (an expanded version of the lightning talk I gave at GUADEC).

Livestream of It’s Not Always Technical from Twitter

Later, Daniel and I presented elementary AppCenter: Native, Open Source, Pay-What-You-Want.

Livestream of our elementary AppCenter talk from Twitter

Both were very well received and spurred on great questions and discussions immediately following and in the following days. It was exciting to help share our experiences and findings from building both elementary OS and AppCenter with other free software contributors. Hopefully what we’ve learned and shared will help improve approaches across the board.

BoFs & Hacking