I’ll have to categorize the areas of massive development:

It was like a wedding of api’s, libraries, programs and users: All parts of the open source creative chain met together and the fusion was immediate and real.

• Colour: management in our files, our applications and throughout our desktop.
• Typography: management, libraries, designing, accessibility and the authors.
• Geometry: Rendering api, computational libraries, new methods and in our apps
• Publishing: the best workflow, the toolchains, the standards and the content.
• Image: composting frameworks, open formats, editing articulation ..more
• Insight & Implementation: research, usability, interaction design & planning

I’ll try to pull apart these categories to cover each projects benefits of the meeting. Like I said, its a lot to take in… I couldn’t be more happy.

So, Thank you!

Thank you to everyone who made the most of their time during LGM.
You were teaching, learning, coding and planning. As a collective, our understanding grew into other new worlds and our code will benefit.

Thank you to everyone who made LGM happen. You were sponsors, helping out during the day, and making introductions between projects.

Even the people who couldn’t make it to Poland, your efforts made LGM possible and look at the benefits. So thank you, again and again.

I’ve always known open source is the best way to develop software (and ideas) and LGM is such a real demonstration of the fact.

I should probably get preachy and mention that the most expensive proprietary company SLA’s will never get you this kind of synergy between your engineers and the api’s they use. But there’s plenty of time for that later.

Stay tuned for more news soon. I’m off to have some chilli crab!

Its been a pleasure using Rawhide this time around.. still glad to be back and stable

Illustrator $599
But Inkscape is free, forever .
Inkscape has a brilliant creative canvas with easy to use tools featuring advanced features that help you achieve your outcome faster.

Photoshop $649 or $999 for extended
But Gimp & Krita are free, forever
Crap selection methods? soix selection !
silly rescale? Liquid rescale !
open raster and stacks more !

InDesign $699
Scribus is free, forever.
Scribus provides outstanding control over creating PDF documents. CMYK, Spot colours, bleed, registration & crop marks, large volume text manipulations, preflight checking…. Absolutely what you need to have your printer to meet your EXACT needs. no more “send me the *indd files so i can alter/destroy your final work. Scribus output speaks for itself.

Autodesk maya or 3dsmax $hitloads
I stopped my flirt with modelling & animation in 2002 so I wont speak about Autodesk products versus blender.. but i think one or two blender examples can speak for themselves….

But what’s the total cost going to be?

What do we pay in pure software licenses for a single workstation that can offer most creative graphical services:

AUD $4,455 - Adobe Creative Suite
AUD $5,415 - Maya unlimited
AUD $3,790 - 3Ds Max
AUD $703 - FontlabStudio
AUD $2,167 - Fontlab AsiaFont Studio
AUD $1,400 - Final Cut Pro
Total AUD $17,930

That price DOES NOT include the insanely expensive video compositing software like flame flint or inferno or the automated publishing software used for tricks that inkscape and gimp can do on any server with their advanced command line interfaces.

And don’t forget!
This is only the current version of the software mentioned. Upgrades are forced on us by commercial software vendors.

I haven’t yet visited a studio who was able to purchase a copy of CS2 once CS3 was released. All the major stores took it off the shelves and all studios wanted to keep their workflow on CS2 and still hire new staff…. ‘Staying put’ meant they couldn’t contract to an external agency running the most recent software and be able to manipulate the files afterwards.. this wouldn’t happen with 100% open standards.

I’m not trying to say that there is a complete feature parity between free graphics software and the proprietary offerings; because the missing features go both ways. I do however argue that a proprietary workflow is effectively throwing your time and money in the bin.

Everyone spends time to learn software, so when learning a proprietary workflow; we are paying, only to pay again and again.

When we learn free software, missing features considered, once we have them. they are with us for good, and everyone else too

I really want to play on the fear that you don’t know how much its going to cost next time around .. and that you’re locked into the workflow by spending the time learning it ..

The innovation seeded at LGM is unquantifiable!

• developers attending LGM don’t focus on product pillars
  If things like better selection algorithms or precision geometry libraries are possible to implement: LGM developers go there! who knows when it will pop up to serve your needs
• developers attending LGM freely give extra attention to specialised industries like typography or 3d imaging
  we make software better just because we can.

We’ve passed $8000 !

This means means the user community for free graphics software is now a gold sponsor! we’re on our way to being a corner stone sponsor and then achieving our $20,000 target !

LGM is the only shared expense of all free graphics software. Certainly a worthwhile investment for the future of your unencumbered creativity!

you cannot put a price on quality, freedom and this much potential

Every year all projects gain a huge boost of development and vision thanks to the discussions that take place at LGM.

You cannot predict the amazing things that will take place at LGM.

• will Blender uncover a new compositing method for video,
• will inkscape enable a new type of spline through cairo?
• will pango get used by fontforge ?
• will ufraw and hugin share more code ?
• One thing is certain;

All free creative software is improved during LGM. and everyone learns more in the process.
This is a one of a kind event!