My European Tour is over, and I’m back in the U.S. I had many interesting and insightful conversations and learned a great deal, as I always do, when I travel and talk with folks that see the world differently than I do–as I’ve said many times, the power of Linux is the community behind it, and the power of any community is the wide variety of vastly different perspectives it can bring to bear on any problem that happens to confront it.

I spoke at conferences (LinuxTag in Karlsruhe, Germany and III Jornades de Programari Lliure in Manresa, Spain), did a few interviews (the EFE interview is the only one I’ve been able to track down–if anyone has links to any others, I’d appreciated them) and had many worthwhile and productive meetings.

I can’t say much about most of those meetings yet, but one of them has already borne fruit: The governments of Extremadura and Andalucia in Spain have agreed to collaborate on a common foundation for their respective distributions (LinEx and Guadalinex), and to build that common foundation from Componentized Linux.

By building LinEx and Guadalinex from a common set of technologies as a collaborative endeavor, the two groups eliminate duplicated effort–most of which goes into things that don’t differentiate them whatsoever–thus freeing up time and energy to focus on new (and heretofore unsolved) problems that confront them, such as how to make the distros better serve the schoolchildren they are designed to teach, and how to address the unique administrative problems that face any group maintaining tens of thousands of geographically dispersed computers with limited resources. In addition, by joining forces around a common distro, the question of how to attract support from hardware and software vendors becomes easier–the ISV/IHV game is all about numbers. It’s a win-win for both groups, and for Progeny as well–we’ve expanded our community with people that bring different perspectives and problems they want to solve to that community, and, of course, we benefit from the additional numbers too.

I’ll write more about what I learned once I’m a bit more caught up on email and work. Suffice to say, for now, that what I heard at the LinEx/Guadalinex meeting was a variation on a much larger theme–and that I’m listening.

Before concluding, I’d like to thank everyone who gave me a place to sleep or fed me or talked to me about what they are doing or took time out to show me their little part of the world. I’d also like to thank everyone whose invitations I wasn’t able to accept due to lack of time. Another European Tour is right around the corner, without a doubt, and I look forward to meeting all of you someday soon.

I’d like to single out a few people for special thanks: to H