Pinky and The Brain return

Finally back in The Netherlands, adjusting to the cold Dutch summer after the warm Brazilian winter. Dalibor and I drew up at least 20 World Domination plans. But after seeing the enthousiasm in Germany and especially Brazil I am convinced we have already won. Just imagine standing in a huge room with hunderds of people around you shouting “Software Livre! Software Livre! Software Livre!”. South America is comming and the rest of the world better starts running now if they want to stay relevant.

At Guadec there were a lot of people interested in the progress we have made in the last year. A couple of people showed and told me about the projects that they were working on. But people seemed a bit shy to admit that they have already adopted GCJ and GNU Classpath for development. Gnome seems to be a bit of a hostile environment for introducing higher level languages and concepts (except for Python!). But I hope we will see some of these projects publicly announced soon. The difference with Fisl was enormous. At Fisl people were really pushing for adoption on all levels, from individual hackers, large user groups, companies to the government. There were a lot of really happy faces when we showed the working demos of GNU Classpath, Kaffe, GCJ 4, java-gnome and native Eclipse. And there was a lot of talk about pushing out more documentation, courses and books about what has been achieved so far.

I cannot thank the SouJava people enough for inviting us to Fisl 6.0. The experience was unforgettable. Thank you!