Michael is a Christian and enthusiastic believer in Free software. He very much enjoys working for Ximian Inc. where as a member of the Research Labs he gets paid to develop Gnome 2.0 infastructure, particularly ORBit2 and Bonobo, and play with interesting things. Prior to this he worked for Quantel gaining expertise in real time AV editing and playback achieved with high performance focused hardware / software solutions.

After an extremely protracted development effort, Gnome 2.0 is approaching stability, while at the same time, a host of exciting things are still happening on Gnome 1.4. This talk will present the compelling advantages of the Gnome environment and community. The new features in Gnome 2.0 will be presented, particularly from a porting, and programming perspective, including GObject, a new ORB, Gtk+ 2.0, pango and accessibility support. A glimpse into the future of Gnome: 2.2 and beyond, and some demonstrations of the latest and greatest hits from both Gnome 1.4 and 2.0, running side by side.