Going to UDS-M

Canonical has been so nice to sponsor my attendance to the next Ubuntu Developer Summit in Brussels next week and Collabora is sponsoring my time there for Telepathy, Python and Sugar stuff. Thanks a lot to both companies.

The Ubuntu community has interest in making as easy as possible for regular users to create software and part of this effort is having a high-level API for having collaboration across the network. This of course will involve Telepathy and I have also a big interest in providing this experience to users of Sugar. Collabora are going to be flying as well some of their Telepathy developers to work on this and I look forward to finally meeting them.

Ubuntu has also committed heavily on Python for their development efforts, both on the desktop and in the server. For the desktop side of things, Python on GNOME is facing several challenges right now and I will be happy to help them make sure they don't lose any opportunities because of that. The challenges I have referred to are the obsolescence of static library bindings and the update to Python 3. On both issues Red Hat has contributed several developers to upstream and I will be happiest to discuss how we can also make Ubuntu contributors most welcome there. I'm also looking forward to finally meet Simon van der Linden in person after working together in PyGI for so long, he happens to live close to the venue so he'll jump to say hello and maybe do some hacking together (I have some patches in the queue that could use some review love).

There's also interest from Edubuntu in shipping Sugar, so I have registered to their blueprint and will be available to answer any questions they have regarding it. I have felt sad often when Ubuntu users have come asking how they could run Sugar on their machines and I had to point them to the instructions to build from the source, so it's great to have the possibility for Sugar to be accepted and supported by Ubuntu at last.