freedesktop - Feb 2007 - [fdo] PRESS RELEASE: Artists and Developers Ally to Boost Open Source Graphics Software. Libre Graphics Meeting 2007 Announced

Artists and Developers Ally to Boost Open Source Graphics Software. Libre
Graphics Meeting 2007 in Montréal. Announced

12 February, 2007 - Building on the overwhelming success of last year's
Libre Graphics Meeting in Lyon, France, key Free/Libre and Open Source
Software (FLOSS) graphics projects are pleased to announce the second
Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM), to be held in Montréal, Québec, Canada,
May 6, 2007 at École Polytechnique de Montréal.

This year's LGM provides a venue where FLOSS graphics application
developers, users and professional artists from all over the world meet
to discuss collaboration, outline the future of the projects together,
with the goal of increasing interaction between developers, professional
graphics artists and print professionals to improve the steadily expanding
FLOSS graphics' application ecosystem.

This ecosystem consists of open source projects such as Blender -
a 3D creation application, Scribus - a professional grade page layout
application, GIMP - a versatile and mature image editor, Inkscape - a
user friendly, yet powerful vector drawing application for SVG, Krita -
a rapidly maturing "natural" painting application, Open Clip Art
Library
- a large public domain collection of freely available artwork, and many
other  projects focussed on graphics creation and editing.

According to Louis Desjardins, a 20 year veteran of pre-press and
print production and organiser of the conference: "LGM is a sure
demonstration of the maturity of free and open source applications -
even at a professional level. Not only that, never before have I seen
such a close and amicable working relationship between the users of this
kind of software and those who create it."

Having experienced the whole evolution from camera ready galleys and
manual stripping to the advent and evolution of DTP, he states: "We
are now seeing Free Software emerge in a domain which was more or less
closed before."

Numerous companies and organisations are showing their support of LGM by
means of sponsorship. They are convinced that LGM has a clear positive
impact on the evolution of the projects present at the conference. LGM
audience is increasing rapidly as we gather momentum. Sponsors have the
opportunity to show their support to the community and get appropriate
web and media exposure. This year they also have the opportunity to
advertise in the LGM Brochure which will be entirely done using FLOSS.

The conference offers presentations of various Free/Libre Open Source
graphics projects, technology previews and talks on general issues such
as open file formats. There will be informal brainstorming sessions
and time for artists and developers to meet face to face and to work on
common goals, which is a characteristic of the FLOSS world.

LGM 2007 is putting out a call for participation, sponsorship, and
discussion. The call for participation includes the submission of at
most 2 paragraph presentation abstracts by interested projects and
individuals. All types of presentations will be considered, including
topics as diverse as collaboration, power-user art techniques, engineering
talks, graphics business best practices, and other relevant topics.


Official website

http://www.libregraphicsmeeting.org/


Source

LGM 2007 organisation


Press Contact

Louis Desjardins louis.desjardins@gmail.com