Making the world a better place -- building a cross-desktop platform

Speaker: Vincent Untz

Collaboration and cooperation between projects in the desktop area has been a hot topic for a long time. This is the reason behind freedesktop.org existence and it has lead us to several successes, like specifications that are of tremendous help for desktop interoperability, and also shared projects such as D-Bus, Poppler and HarfBuzz. It is hard to deny the benefits this brought us and makes a good case to do even more -- as a matter of fact, contributors are mostly all in favor of continuing on this way. However, we too often don't try to explore this sharing way, generally for one simple reason: it's much harder and slower in the short term than to just do what you want. Does this mean we're failing and that it's too late? No: let's step back a bit, think, discuss, make difficult choices. And help create a better place for everyone.