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@...155...