Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth comments on release cycles and the decisions involved in a post that I think clearly shows the level of maturity that Open Source projects now have in both attitude in responsibility to users and software engineering practices.
But the bit that really interested me was:
I’m really delighted by the recent announcement of that the main GNOME and KDE annual developer conferences (GUADEC and aKademy) will be held at the same time, and in the same place, in 2009. This is an important step towards even better collaboration. Initiatives like FreeDesktop.org have helped tremendously in recent years, and a shared conference venue will accelerate that process of bringing the best ideas to the front across both projects. Getting all of the passionate and committed developers from both of these into the same real-space will pay dividends for both projects.
This is great news for Accessibility and now we have funding for the work of moving the AT-SPI infrastructure to D-BUS, we will have the same accessibility platform on both desktops and that will some healthy cross-pollination of ideas between desktops. This moves us closer to my dream of Linux leading the way in desktop accessibility.
Keywords: accessibility, GNOME, KDE, Linux