So last week, after some hard work, I went to an event in Paris: Paris Capitale du Libre. It's mainly a corporate event, but there were still the french usual suspects from the community -- you know, people you can see at most events in France :-) I had some good discussions there, and also animated a panel about the common points and the differences among free OS. We talked about OS because it was not just about distributions based on the Linux kernel. It went quite well and Frédéric appeared out of nowhere to talk about Debian, which turned out to be a nice surprise.

As part of this event, some awards named the Lutèce d'Or are given away. The goal here is to reward some people, projects or companies who have been pushing some initiatives in the free software world, and to inspire new projects in the free software world, and more generally stimulate innovation.

I guess that, by now, everybody knows what the GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility is. Or, as lazy people like me call it, GOPA. Do you see where I'm heading? Yep, we won the prize for the best community-driven effort for GOPA! The reason I'm really happy about this is not that GNOME won, but that it will hopefully help make more people aware of accessibility. This is a field that we know is too often ignored, and that needs a lot of love from everybody.

Christophe went to the ceremony to receive the prize. I think he was really happy since he was the first to stand up to receive a prize (it was the first prize delivered) and he was very visible thanks to the way he was dressed ;-) I didn't see our prize myself, but I saw the prize of some other winners and, wow, this thing is quite heavy! And nice, of course.

Also, openSUSE was in the final set of candidates for the worldwide-developed free software project for the Build Service, but lost to OpenOffice.org. Ah, well, we'll try again next year ;-)