Desktop Summit 2011: Copyright Assignment, Wayland & Beer

The Desktop Summit is beginning at the end of this week as the joint conference between the GNOME and KDE communities. This year's Desktop Summit is taking place in the wonderful city of Berlin and will go from the 6th to 12th of August. At Humboldt University there will be a number of interesting Linux desktop talks and other events.

I'll be at the Desktop Summit for the duration of the event, after getting into Berlin from Oslo on Friday. Saturday is when the summit officially begins at Humboldt, but Friday evening is a pre-registration event / party at Berlin's C-Base -- a well-known hacker-space down by the river (hopefully this time nobody will be battling for pickles).

Kudos to the organizer of the Desktop Summit for managing the event at Humboldt, which is particularly convenient and better than LinuxTag at the Messe -- granted, there's obvious size differences, but Humboldt is much more centrally located. As a bonus, for any German Phoronix readers looking for a free subscription to Phoronix Premium, the Friedrichstraße S-Bahn station right by Humboldt has a little Bavarian food stand where they do serve Augustiner (or you're also welcome to bring your own local beers from other parts of Germany).

As luck would have it, this weekend in Berlin is also Berlin's international beer festival.

On Saturday the talks I intend to be at (and will post any interesting information on Phoronix) include:

- Dirk Hohndel's keynote about large companies (i.e. Intel) playing nicely in an open-source world.
- Heart of Blingness: Clutter and GNOME
- Clutter Everywhere
- Compositing after X - KWin on the Road to Wayland by Martin Gräßlin
- GNOME: The state of the Union
- GNOME Shell version π
- Panel on Copyright Assignment. This panel is a new addition to the Desktop Summit and will feature Mark Shuttleworth, Michael Meeks, and Bradley Kuhn fighting it out over copyright assignment.

On Sunday the talks I'll likely be at include:

- Blending the web and the desktop
- Plasma Active - Conquering the Device Spectrum
- UI Design in a Cloud of Diverse Devices
- GTK 4 - the future of your favorite toolkit
- systemd and Login Sessions
- Integrating virtualization into the desktop
- KDE Platform 4 Roadmap
- Sunday night is then a party at "The Box at the Beach", which is another pleasant venue in Berlin. Free beer, food, and music until 02.00.

My involvement on Monday will likely be at:

- Making and Distributing Games
- LiMux Desktop retrospective
- Free desktops for Europe's public sector
- Ramblings of a retired release manager
- Daily Melee: paid people within Free Software initiatives - How they tick, how to keep them and the art of behaving if you are one.
- Making Wine less broken
- Towards a multitouch gnome-shell
- GStreamer 1.0

Monday night is then the KDE vs. GNOME football game and Tuesday is an island party. The rest of the week just consists of BoFs and workshops.

See you in Berlin in a few days. If any Phoronix Berlin readers would like to meet-up, let me know or find out where I am on Twitter. I'll be flying back to the United States on the 11th of August.