FrogBlog

Last friday a few fellow KDE-attached colleagues and me made our way to the KDE4 release party which was held at the mighty fine offices of freiheit.com.

Since there wasn’t much time left for Sven to organize the whole thing,  I was (more than) sceptical that there would be an actual party (with lots of people, beer et cetera) taking place. Turned out that I was wrong, very much so. When we arrived at 7:05pm (or something like that - the party was scheduled for 7pm) two nice ladies were waiting downstairs and crossing names out of a list. I didn’t know that we had to sign up for the party! Luckily, it seemed that Harri sent them our names, so one of the two ladies led us via the elevator to the party area. 

Amazingly, the room was already quite full when we arrived there. I would say there were about 30 people at the time we arrived and at the peak of the party there were about 50. I was pleasantly surprised! The freiheit.com people have a nice flat-screen display embedded into the wall of their cafeteria so we were able to view the live feed from Mountain View all the time. However, it was virtually impossible to understand anything which any of the speakers said simply because it was quite noisy in the office. I can’t say I missed the sound of the live stream very much, given that it can be viewed on youtube later (so I’ve been told).

All in an it was a very nice success, showing that one can certainly pull such OSS parties off in the HH area.

When the car* manned with our delegation of KDE developers paved its way through the dark and rainy streets of Hamburg I was expecting at most 10 guests (including us) to show up at the local branch of the worldwide KDE 4 release party. The place was crowded! The live stream from the California event was displayed on a screen - congrats to everyone involved in setting it up. Unfortunately, the speeches themselves drowned in the the noise of everyone chatting and having a drink or sausage in a bread roll and not exactly standing silent in awe. Had a bit of an art happening to see a babbling crowd of people gathered in the stylish freiheit.com rooms decorated by a live picture of a muted man gestucilating towards the viewers for 2 hours or more.

The number of people showing interest to come after the announcement necessitated the installation of an online registration. Quickly the max capacity was filled up. Many - like myself - learnt about this only in the last minute but were still lucky to end up on the list at the receiption. I later learnt that others were less lucky and could not enter anymore. Sorry to hear that! But the room was really jam-packed. Good news is that after last night a local event organizer has shown great interest in hosting bigger events (like Akademy) in the future.

The groups of attendees was a mix of KDE as well as Gnome developers and users. Provided for many interesting talks including a reunion with aRts author Stefan Westerfeld. Hope to receive some pictures to publish soon. Thanks for everyone who came and demonstrated that the Hanseatic City of Hamburg has a lively Free and Open Source Software scene.

Harri.

* Public transport is free here tomorrow. An attempt to repeat the car-free Sundays from 1973. Just (still?) voluntary this time.

Is the Swedish tradition of throwing “used” Christmas trees out of the window on a certain day a real one? That’s what a commercial of the furniture store IKEA wants us to believe at least. I don’t know which day would have been the right one but it was fun either way. Graceful glide from the fourth floor, no pedestrians or cyclists hurt.

To the main topic of this post: The city of Hamburg will join the choir of KDE 4 release parties taking place world-wide later this week. Sven Reumann has organized the local version for Friday, January 18st, 19:00 o’clock at freiheit.com, Straßenbahnring 22. Our new office is nice but the landmarked, refurbished, former streetcar depot occupied by freiheit.com is just impressive. We stick to supporting the culinary aspect.

Everyone with involvement or interest in KDE is heartily invited to join. Use the chance to meet with former, current and future contributors and users of our and other Free Software projects. Knowing the reliability of computer software we also count on being connected live with other places around the world.