2014-08-16 Went to the GNU Hacker's Meeting (GHM), which took place in Mun- ich. It was easy for me to get there, hence I took the chance to find out what this GNU community is like. Unfortunately, I couldn't go there on the day of the keysigning, but only for to- day (Saturday). My impression is that the GNU community is like a separate fami- ly. Their topics were different to those which I come across every day. Actually, a lot of the stuff I heard the first time, but they talked of them as if it were absolutely standard in their world. It seemed a bit as if GNU is a world of its own, or those guys like to see it as a world of its own. They hardly seem to care about the GNU/Linux distributions, but focus on the GNU system alone. Well, maybe my own view angle is a bit too much GNU/Linux bound. Anyway, the best talk was Christian Grothoff's about the GNU Name System (GNS). Ever heard of GNUnet? I don't want to think about the question if I like this stuff, but the talk was very good and I saw that there are many worlds besides the popular ones we enter everyday. (As to expect, Plan9 provided great concepts. You'll discover concepts of the /n filesystem in GNS.) A bit disappointing, however, was this GNU guy who, in the search of a piece of software to build upon, told us that the GPLv2 (without ``or later'') would (now) be seen as problematic for in- cluding it into GNU. What? They disqualify their own License. This is nothing different from OpenBSD's NIH syndrom. So much en- ergy wasted! So bad! In general, going to GHM was a nice experience but no big hit. Although everyone was friendly and the atmosphere was like in a family, no one asked me who I was and what I am doing. Sure, I was completely passiv and didn't care much, but it would have been nice to feel that the family cares about the outsiders. Furthermore, I had the feeling that money played a greater role as in the other conferences I've visited. http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke