[LAU] LAC2010, some thoughts

[Philipp]

Excerpts from rosea.grammostola's message of 2010-05-06 20:42:52 +0200:
> Hi,
> 
> LAC2010 some thoughts:
> 
> 
> Great organization and kudos for Marc and others for getting this
> conference to The Netherlands. The advantage of having this conference
> in a different country each year, is that more different people are able
> to join and get enthusiastic. 
> 
> The disadvantage of having one LAC each year on one continent is that
> most people are from Europe, a few from USA. You could think of having
> one LAC conference in Europe and one in USA. 

Dunno about two conferences, but I sure don't want it to become another
US-only conference. All other Linux related conferences I know of are
in the US or Australia.

> I've spoken to a lot of kind, special and smart people on LAC, that was
> great.
> 
> I've been inspired by art projects like those of Marije and I saw how
> interesting the combination of technology, computers and art can be.
> 
> The live performances where great. I especially liked the piece of
> Fernando.
> 
> All the performance where 'experimental music' or livecoding. As
> mentioned in the 'future of LAC meeting' I would like to see more Jazz,
> Rock etc. 
> 
> Also most people I met on LAC where developers, I'd like to see more
> users and more workshops like the ones from Lieven, Jorn and the
> beginners workshop Supercollider from Marije and others.
> 
> I agree though that the main goal of LAC should be for developers to
> meet and present what they're doing. But once that goal is set firmly,
> without discussion, I think there should also be more space and
> interesting stuff for users. The mentioned alternatives for users like
> Pixel festival and Creative Commons festivals, don't fill in the need
> for the average Linux audio rocker imo. They are more aiming on
> technology and art or has to little to do with Linux. 
> Maybe the users (LAU, LinuxMusicians, LinuxMAO etc.) should organize
> their own festival and get their place on (or call it around) the
> regular LAC to organize workshops and concerts. 

Sounds like an interesting idea. I'm just a user and I wanted to
attend the LAC for at least the last two years, but never managed. I do
think it is a bit dev-centric, and I would have gone there mainly to
meet people I only know from the internet thus far.
I agree that it would be nice to have enough stuff that's interesting to
users. At least some of the talks I've seen were really quite technical.
Not that it's a bad thing, there just should be enough other stuff to
make it interesting for users too.

> Interesting was also the confrontation between the OSX users from HKU
> and the open source advocates. In this I agree both with Fons (and
> others) and Marc. The focus should be Linux audio and so we want to see
> live music made on Linux. But I think it's also a good think to let
> students arts meet open source software and let FLOSS developers meet
> artists who like to make bread with their art.
> 
> Thanks again!
> 
> \r

I think everyone noticed the quite big number of presentations done on
OSX and even one on Windows. I don't know about the concerts. I think we
could see it the way Jörn did: those OSX/Windows users are not-yet
converts interested in Linux audio. Personally I attribute it to the
ever-increasing number of cross-platform applications. I would like to
see all presentations on Linux, especially since I don't see what's
missing on Linux to do presentations and since everything presented at a
LAC should run on Linux (else, why is it there?).
Yet a confrontation and interchange with users of other OSes is probably
a good thing. Kind of a reality check, it shows on the one side what's
missing, on the other what's possible already.

Well, I'm already looking forward to next year and hope I'll be able to
attend.
-- 

Regards,
Philipp