[General] FOSSCamp Boston notes

[Mike Taylor]

I spent two days at FOSSCamp Boston this past weekend where I talked  
to a lot of Ubuntu, Debian and even a couple Red Hat developers.  The  
target audience for the event were people who are either developers  
or package maintainers for many of the core and secondary packages  
that make up the average linux distribution.  For example, there were  
project leads and devs from Gnome, KDE, Kernel, Samba, Ubuntu, Red  
Hat and many others.

I was able to wear my Chandler t-shirt the first day and even before  
I put on my name tag (which just said OSAF) a good number of people  
either recognized the logo or knew from the name  
"chandlerproject.org" who I was.  After being introduced a number of  
times in the various meetings the other half of the people started to  
get the logo and asked me questions.

My official purpose was to go and find out how to get Chandler and  
Cosmo into the Ubuntu Hardy distribution, but my secondary goal was  
to spread the word :)

The reaction to my description of Chandler a large part of the time  
fell into two major groups:

   1. "Cool, so you have shared calendars and it looks great, but  
when will it do X" where X was one of a) when will it connect to  
Exchange b) when will it work with mobile phones c) where is the  
email support and d) it took you 5 years to do this

   2. The other reaction, which was expected given the concentration  
of Open Source folks, was "Why didn't you just sign up to help with  
Evolution or KMail or Kontact or ...."

Many times once I explained how Chandler was focused on helping  
manage the flow of tasks and information and not just trying to be a  
simple calendar/email client, they often got it and were satisfied.   
I also mentioned that the project was started before a lot of the  
other projects were really stable and other reasons.

Here are some of the other reactions, I wanted to include them since  
they came from more than one person in general:

	- where are the linux screen shots
	- where are the deb packages
	- why was cosmo written in Java?  (which when I pressed they were  
just complaining about Sun's license)
	- when will Exchange be supported
	- when will Chandler sync to mobile phones
	- where is the address book - this came up just as much as the  
Exchange question
	- where was ACL support

When I talked in detail to the people who were asking the "when will  
Exchange be supported" all of them were asking because they would  
love to be the "hero" of there group by being able to offer an Ubuntu  
solution to the Exchange "problem".

At the BOF I scheduled I was able to give a demo of both Chandler and  
Cosmo to 12 people (the total attendance at the event was around 70)  
who all were keenly interested in Chandler and Cosmo and really  
seemed to "get" the idea of the dashboard and loved how Collections  
worked and were very impressed with the syncing abilities.

thanks,
bear