The CDT Fall summit for this year starts tomorrow here at QNX headquarters and I’m getting both excited and nervous, as I guess I should. We’ve had a number of summits in the past starting all the way back with the first one in July 2002 when QNX brought the CDT as we know it to the world. That summit and pretty much everyone since then has had kind-a the same feel. Lots of people have been interested in what was going on, but few have had the resources to commit to helping out.

But you know, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a pretty difficult decision for corporations to commit resources to work on open source projects. It’s difficult to track the return on their investment and there are a slough of legal issues that need to be addressed and tracked to make sure the IP walls are set up correctly, and I’m not just talking networking. I’ve learned to be patient, not get too down when hopes fail to materialize. In the end, simply using the CDT and distributing it in their products means that the CDT is getting good test coverage, which is just as important these days.

My feel for this one, though, is different. Maybe it’s because I’m starting to be overly optimistic. We have around the same number of attendees registered as we did last year, and a lot of them are the same faces. However, this year most of the attendees have been contributors to the CDT. Some have become committers over the year and some will become committers shortly after the summit. We’ll use this as an opportunity make sure we are talking to eachother and co-ordinating our work. We’ll also use it as a team building exercise as I’m sure we’ll find a few battles along the way. It sure helps when you know the person at the other end of the bugzilla entry when smoothing over issues.

Finally this year, it looks like our contributors summit will focus much less on recruiting contributors and much more on co-ordinating actual contributions. It’s a much funner summit to run and hopefully a much funner summit to attend.