GUADEC 2006 
Press Release 
Final Draft - version 4 
 
Be part of GNOME - GUADEC 2006 in Catalonia, Spain 
 
BOSTON, Mass. June 20, 2006 -- More than 500 software developers, businesses, government officials and enthusiasts from across the globe are expected to attend the 7th annual GNOME Users And Developers European Conference (GUADEC) in Vilanova i la Geltrú, Spain to advance GNOME -- the Free Software desktop project. 
 
The seven-day Conference will be held from the June 24th through the 30th and will focus on advancing and improving GNOME -- the free desktop software and development environment for personal computers, workstations, and portable Internet devices. 

GUADEC is one of the leading developer conferences on Free and Open Source software. This year, the conference will be held in co-operation with the office Telecommunications and Information Society office of the Catalan government. 

GUADEC -- The future of GNOME 
 
Opening keynote will be presented by Jeff Waugh, developer and evangelist of the Free and Open Source software who works on community outreach for Canonical, the company behind GNU/Linux distribution Ubuntu.  Jeff Waugh is an active member of the Free Software community, holding positions such as Chariman of Annodex Foundation (2006), Director of GNOME foundation Board (2003,2004, and 2006).  In 2005, he won the Google/O'Reilly Open Source award for Best Evangelist. 

Other speakers include Jim Gettys, Vice President of Engineering of the One Laptop Per Child project. He will be talking about the challenges and opportunities faced by the $100 laptop project that aims to give children a chance to learn using specially designed laptops.

Antonio Jose Saenz and Jose Angel Diaz will be presenting "Big GNOME Deployments: the GNULinEx and Guadalinex Use Cases." Simon Philipps from Sun Microsystem's will focus his presentation on "Free Software at Sun Microsystems", talking about Sun's experience with Free Software.  Waldo Bastian of Open Source Development Labs (OSDL)  will be presenting "Portland - The Linux Desktop untangled", an interesting look at the GNU/Linux as a platform.  Sebastian Bacher and Daniel Holbach at Canonical will talk about Ubuntu, while Carlos Guerreiro of Nokia will talk about the GNOME Ecosystem from Nokia’s perspective. 

GUADEC -- The GNOME Software Family 
 
The first GUADEC which was held in Paris in June 2000, is the gathering of GNOME developers from around the world. Developers and Users are coming from Germany, France, the United States, China, Mongolia, Nigeria, Columbia, and Chile. 

More than 30 GNOME related software projects will be represented ranging from advanced software frameworks like Mono – a .NET framework, Maemo – Nokia’s embedded device software for the N770, Gstreamer – the common audio backend for Free Software Desktops, and Telepathy – a new VOIP/Instant Messaging framework. Other cutting edge software projects that will be represented are: F-Spot for photo managing software, Gossip for instant messaging client, Beagle for desktop search, and Ekiga – a videoconferencing and VOIP software. 

GNOME Sponsors 
 
GNOME development is sponsored by many companies.  Some of them are: Nokia (opensource.nokia.com and maemo.org) is working hard on GNOME through development of the Maemo platform for the 770 Internet Tablet; OSDL (osdl.org) is a non-profit organization that provides state-of-the-art computing and testing facilities available to developers around the world; Sun Microsystems (sun.com/software/opensource/), a significant participant and contributor to industry-changing open source projects including; and HP (opensource.hp.com), one of the leading supporters to open source software around the globe. 
 
Other sponsors include: Imendio (imendio.com), Igalia (igalia.com), Fluendo (fluendo.com), Google (google.com), OpenHand (o-hand.com), Red Hat (redhat.com), Intel (intel.com), the Open Source project of autonomous region Extremadura gnuLinEx.org (gnulinex.org) and Novell (novell.com).
 
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Weblinks of interest: 
 
The GUADEC Pressroom 
http://guadec.org/Guadec2006/pressRoom 
 
The GNOME Conference 
www.guadec.org 
 
The GNOME Project 
www.gnome.org 
 
The GNOME Foundation 
http://foundation.gnome.org/ 
 
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GUADEC – Press Services 
 
For international/U.S. journalists: 
Quim Gil, GUADEC Marketing 
qgil@gnome.org 
Mobile +34-6 75 33 73 15 
 
For Spanish journalists: 
Javier Vazquez, Igalia, S. L., Coruña-Vigo (Galicia)  
jvazquez@igila.com 
Mobile +34-6 15 84 52 73