Hoards of hackers in similar-looking t-shirts with funny logos having the b in front of the K (see below for some sort of explanation) were seen on the streets of London on Friday June 3rd 2011.

Thanks a lot to  Google UK who hosted our Rockbox developers conference this time in central London.

We had some short-time visitors but we were 16-18 reverse engineering happy persons in a single room most of the weekend, where we hacked away on code, whined on the amount of outstanding patches and bugs and generally made a large amount of bad jokes and Monthy Python references.

The happy core team was caught on a picture:

On the Saturday we plowed through a lengthy list of discussion points to really make the most of all of us gathering physically. Among the outcomes from that is that we decided we want to change to git, we think a lot of future of Rockbox lies in the app for Android, we keep the Archos support and more. The Android builds are going to get into the build system ASAP and we’re gonna setup a system where (only) trusted build clients will participate in the building of Android builds that will be distributed to users – this since applications on phones will have a much greater risk of causing harm if some “bad guy” would try to infect our system with stupid things.

Dominik “bluebrother” Riebling brought up the very interesting point that none of us had noticed: we have two different logos being used in the project: one with the K being in front of the b (like the one on the web page) and one with the K being behind the b – which is used in SVG logos and on just about all Rockbox t-shirts made so far! If you zoom in on the tshirts on the group picture you’ll see!

We will also start allowing GPLv3 code into Rockbox in order to be able to use espeak, but all our code will remain GPLv2 or later. I could only find a single USB header file left that comes from the Linux source tree and has a GPLv2 only license.

Even more than this was discussed but I figure the rest of the details will be posted properly on rockbox.org for those seriously interested.

All in all, it was a very enjoyable weekend with a lot of fun and great friends. We stayed at a hotel just a few blocks from the devcon office which was really convenient. even though its wakeup routine was a bit non-standard. Peter “petur” D’Hoye took a lot of pictures as usual.

We also managed to break the Tower of Rockbox record.

The group picture was taken by a Google person I don’t know the name of who helped us out, and the one of me was taken by Peter D’Hoye.