Safe as Milk

Thank you Michael Tiemann!

The Libre Graphics Meeting fundraising campaign has now surpassed $6000, including our first thousand-dollar donation, courtesy of Michael Tiemann, board member of OSI and VP of Open Source Affairs at RedHat.

Thank you Michael, and thank you everyone else who has donated! Our community is now a bigger sponsor than Intel and Google, and is officially our biggest sponsor this year! Only $2000 more, and our community will be a Gold sponsor, and over half way to Cornerstone sponsor level.

Libre Graphics Meeting stories: colour management

Continuing the series of articles I started last week (part 1, part 2), the next fall-out which has come from past Libre Graphics Meetings is the movement towards colour management everywhere over the past few years.

Let’s look back to where we were 3 years ago. Outside of Scribus and CinePaint, there was essentially no colour management in free software graphics apps, in spite of the existence of a high quality color management library, little cms.

In 2005, that story started to change a bit – the GIMP started conserving ICC profiles in JPEG files and allowing the user to see the list of ICC profiles with the 2.3.2 release, in July 2005. Scribus added support for soft proofing in version 1.2.3 in September 2005. Krita released version 1.5 with support for color profiles in December 2005.

In the first Libre Graphics Meeting, one of the most popular presentations was by Marti Maria of little cms, who gave an overview of what color management is, how ICC color profiles fit into the picture, and finally what applications need to do to integrate color management support. One of the outstanding memories I have from the conference was Carl Worth of Cairo being very excited about the conference, and in particular about meeting Marti.

Since 2005, things have changed significantly.  Color management support has been completed for the GIMP in 2.4.0. Inkscape added support for ICC profiles in 0.44, in June 2006, soon after the first Libre Graphics Meeting in Lyon, and this support has been further improved in the recent 0.46 release.

And since, color management has become almost ubiquitous – via the “ICC profiles in X” spec, all applications who support the spec (including, at last count, the GIMP, Eye of GNOME, Krita, UFRaw and Inkscape)  get soft proofing for your screen when X contains the ICC profile atom.

I’m not so presumptuous as to attribute the advent of color management to the Libre Graphics Meeting, but at least in the case of Inkscape, the work started at the conference. And for other developments, the bridges built and conversations started during LGM and other similar conferences has played a significant part in improving the state of affairs.

Libre Graphics Meeting: Our newest sponsor

I’m delighted to present our newest sponsor for this year’s Libre Graphics Meeting:

Our sponsorship levels for the conference are:

• Silver: over $3000 and under $8000
• Gold: over $8000 and under $15000
• Cornerstone: over $15000

Which means that we’re now just about half way to being able to move the community up to a Gold sponsor! Thank you again everybody!

Over 100 donations!

The Libre Graphics Meeting fundraising campaign passed a significant milestone during the day – we have over 100 donations now! As I write this in Chicago airport, we’ve currently raised $3533, with 11 days left in the campaign. But don’t leave it until the last minute to donate!

Hello Neary Consulting

So, never let it be said that I am original when it comes to thinking up names.

I finally put the website for my company, Neary Consulting, online earlier this week. There’s not much there for the moment, but I have written before about what I expect my core activity to be: helping companies rock as community members.

Two situations come to mindimmediately.

• You have a free software product, and you’re having trouble building up a community around it. 95% of the contributions coming into the project are from your employees, and you’re spending a bunch of resources on community liaison people who don’t seem to be getting many new contributors in.
• You have a hacker working on some free software that you’re using in your products. Every change you ask him to make seems to take longer, since he has to maintain a separate branch for all the work that he’s doing. Once every few months, he comes to you and insists that you should update to the latest version of the upstream project, and every upgrade seems to introduce new interesting bugs, and causes a few regressions, as the merge always takes a few weeks to get right.

In both these situations, the problem is likely to be that you’re not interacting well with the people outside your company. Your hacker isn’t working on getting his work upstream, or doesn’t understand the changes which might conflict with his work. Or your free software project isn’t taking off because most of your team don’t understand this community stuff much, and anyway, didn’t you created the community liaison guy in the first place so that they wouldn’t have to?

I’m caricaturing, of course, but many organisations will recognise themselves in these two scenarios. And I think I can help make things better in both cases. Not perfect, but better. How? By helping engineers and managers understand community dynamics, and work to align their investments, expectations and development practices to get the most out of their interactions with free software communities.

Libre Graphics Meeting stories: Shared resources

Graphics applications have lots of associated files that we call resources or assets, which help the artist achieve what he’s looking for.

Some of the resources which are used by an application like the GIMP are paintbrushes, patterns, gradients, fonts, colour profiles and palettes. On top of this, you can add things like clip-art and probably others that I’ve forgotten which are important to other types of application.

Three years ago, pretty much none of this data was shared between applications. The GIMP had long been using very simple formats for its data, designed to be easy to write and easy to parse. Some other applications, for example Krita, adopted the same file formats for some of the formats, and thus created some de facto  standards for things like dynamic bitmap brushes and patterns, but there wasn’t much sharing going on.

Through the Create project and the shared resources spec current practices and formats were documented and attention brought to what we could share. The OpenICC spec proposed a way to share ICC device profiles throughout the system for colour management. In the first and second Libre Graphics Meeting, progress has been made on improving the situation of shared resources. Today, you can share patterns between the GIMP, Krita, and Cinepaint. Palettes (or swatches) can be shared between Inkscape, Scribus, the GIMP, Krita and Cinepaint. Gradients can be shared between Krita, the GIMP and Inkscape among others.

Some areas where work would be useful would be in defining a shared access point for clipart to be used by all applications, and have the various applications (including OpenOffice.org) ship with a clipart browser which allowed applications to easily take advantage of the work of the Open Clipart library, and finally splitting out all of the resources which can be shared into a separate package, which would be installed in one place and used by everyone. But already, we have come a long way in being able to share all of the resources you expect among lots of different applications, in large part because of the collaboration that has happened at the Libre Graphics Meeting.

Almost $2000 in 2 days campaigning

I woke up this morning to find out that we are fast approaching the $2000 level in our fundraising campaign! As I write this, we have now raised $1780 in the two days since the campaign opened on the 2nd of April, bringing us to 9% of our goal amount, with 14 days left in the campaign.

As of tomorrow, the community will be listed on the Libre Graphics Meeting website as a silver sponsor, the same level as Google, Intel and the Free Software Foundation,  and as we continue to pass the sponsorship levels, we will move the community to Gold, and then to Cornerstone sponsor levels.

I am deeply in awe of the generosity of the people who are donating, and deeply impressed by the passion of the user community of these applications which we’re helping improve by hosting this conference.

Thank you all very much!

Update: One hour after posting this, Sebastian Bober pushed us over the $2000 mark – we’re now at over 10% of our objective!

Libre Graphics Meeting stories: SIOX

Throughout the two weeks of our fundraising campaign for LGM 3 in Wrocklaw, I will be writing entries regularly about past LGM and GIMP Conference successes, which I hope will go some way to explaining why I think this conference is so important.

The first in the series comes from Libre Graphics Meeting 1 in Lyon. A few months before the conference, Gerald Frieldland, author of SIOX, sent me an email:

Sven Neumann encouraged me to ask you about this: If you are interested, I would also like to give a talk about the current development of the SIOX selection tool in GIMP. I think people will find a talk about SIOX especially interesting, since we are trying to create a more generic tool that could be integrated into other free graphics (plus video) tools, too.

David Odin replied with an enthusiastic “Yes, please!” – “The siox tool is a bit magic, and is thus suited for a talk”, and we duly scheduled him a spot on the first day of the meeting.

For those who don’t know, SIOX is the plug-in which allows you to intelligently select foreground or background objects in the GIMP by drawing inside the object.

Rui Campos of Blender posted a review of the first day, which included this comment:

One of the most interesting talks for me was SIOX, it started at 11:00 and it was focused on a nice API that gives the ability to extract the foreground from a still picture in very few steps, but with very good results.

…
It would be really good to have it integrated into Blender as a Node in the new node editor, perhaps some coder can pick it up ? It is only 600 lines of code in Java, the source is Open Source and is available at the project website.

That sounded promising, but imagine the surprise of everyone when the following appeared in Rui’s review of day 2:

By the way, on SIOX integration, check this screenshot, thank Brecht for a long night no sleep ….

Talk about rocking collaboration!

Since then SIOX support has been added to Inkscape as well. It would be great to see a gstreamer node based on it too so that it could get included in diva and PiTiVi (hint, hint).

links for 2008-04-02

• Support the Libre Graphics Meeting
  The Libre Graphics Meeting is kind of my baby – I would love to see the cornerstone sponsor this year be our user community.
  (tags: lgm libre graphics meeting fundraising)

Support the Libre Graphics Meeting!

In only two years, the Libre Graphics Meeting has become a hugely important meeting place for free software graphics developers. With surveys showing that the main gaps in the Linux desktop offering now are graphics applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, Visio, AutoCAD), the conference becomes even more vital to the advancement of the free software desktop.

A few weeks ago, I got a heads-up from the Libre Graphics Meeting organisers that we weren’t doing so well on the sponsorship front as we have in the past. The major cost center for the conference will be subsidising travel and accommodation for volunteer developers who could not otherwise attend.

And so, today, we launch a fundraising campaign! With the help of Pledgie and the GNOME Foundation we have set an ambitious but necessary target – we hope to raise $20,000 in community donations over the next two weeks.

For those who appreciate the projects that this conference supports (including Inkscape, Scribus, GIMP, Blender, Krita, Open Clipart, …) and have been looking for a way to support them, then please give generously. And spread the word! To get the word out, embed the following in your webpages:

Thank you all for your support.