Last week, I gave a con­fer­ence [1] about KDE in the first free soft­ware con­gress of Ar­genti­na.

I can't even re­mem­ber how many "first(what­ev­er)lin­ux" of "first(what­ev­er)free soft­ware(­mum­ble)" events I have at­tend­ed. one of these days, I ex­pect to at­tend a sec­ond, and in a decade or so a third, but it seems orgniz­ing one of these things, even when they work nice­ly, is tir­ing work.

This one was or­ga­nized by Usuar­ia, a non-prof­it for com­put­ing dif­fu­sion [2] , and they had some in­ter­est­ing spon­sors, in­clud­ing Red Hat, Sun, and Mi­cro­soft.

Yes, that Mi­cro­soft.

Sad­ly, I could­n't as­sist the con­fer­ence by the MS ex­ec­u­tive, be­cause I missed about half of the con­gress for work.

My KDE stuff was shown at a small­er room, about 35/40 peo­ple. Since there was very lit­tle time (45 min­utes) and I want­ed to keep some for Q&A, I most­ly showed sim­ple stuff, like DCOP, some of the new app­s, like Quan­ta.

I spoke a lot about rather the philo­soph­i­cal thrust of KDE de­vel­op­men­t, how KDE tends to search for a tech­no­log­i­cal so­lu­tion to the UI prob­lem­s, on the grounds that lat­er, when ev­ery­one is us­ing the API, if the UI changes and the API does­n't ev­ery­one win­s.

Noth­ing spe­cial, re­al­ly, and not one of my best ones, so my ear­li­er nervio­sism was war­rant­ed ;-)

I at­tend­ed some oth­er con­fer­ences, I re­mem­ber one about com­par­ing MTAs (he called Qmail dif­fi­cult, so I did­n't like it much ;-), one about Free Soft­ware eco­nom­ics by a guy from Maas­tricht [3] which was quite good.

An­oth­er one was by a Nov­ell ex­ec­u­tive, who spoke about J2EE and .NET from a free soft­ware per­spec­tive.

Or rather, spoke about J2EE for a while, then men­tioned Mono be­cause he was run­ning out of time ;-)

I met my third KDE de­vel­op­er! [4] Pu­peno was there. Pu­peno: you look like a younger, red­head­ed RM­S. And your pants made me dizzy.

I could­n't tell you that per­son­al­ly. I like them :-)

I could tell this was a Lin­ux even be­cause hlf the peo­ple there had longer hair and/or longer beards than I do, when in reg­u­lar events it's un­like­ly 10% do.

Met a few of the old fel­lows from my LUG in San­ta Fe, one of them seems to en­joy suits now ;-)

But I bet since a few para­graphs above ev­ery­one is still hav­ing the word Mi­cro­soft bounc­ing in his head.

Yes, they were a spon­sor. Fur­ther: they were, by far, the largest one.

I got a Mi­cro­soft pen, a copy of Unix Ser­vices for Unix, a brochure, and a can­vas bag with Mi­crosoft­'s lo­go em­broi­dered.

Said bag is now the bed of my new kit­ten, Nini, which I adopt­ed mon­day (but that's an­oth­er sto­ry).

UP­DATE: Some­one who was there re­mind­ed me that I al­so got a box con­tain­ing a fair­ly nice tukey sand­wich, a brown­ie, and a small bot­tle of co­ca co­la, so, thank you, Mi­crosoft!

And no, I did­n't have to sign any­thing to get the sand­wich, not a NDA, not a li­cense, and no, it was­n't wrapped in a bag say­ing "if you open this bag you agree..."