Month: July 2010

Desktop Summit 2011 to be held in Berlin, Germany

Berlin, 6th October, 2010 – The Desktop Summit is a co-located event which features the yearly contributor conferences of the GNOME and KDE communities, GUADEC and Akademy. Next year the conference will take place from 6 to 12 August, 2011 in Berlin at the Humboldt University in Unter den Linden. The event will feature keynotes, talks, workshops and team building events. The Desktop Summit website is now online at desktopsummit.org.

The GNOME and KDE communities develop the majority of Free Software desktop technology. Increasingly, they cooperate on underlying infrastructure. By holding their annual developer flagship events in the same location, the two projects will further foster collaboration and discussion between their developer communities. Moreover, KDE and GNOME aim to work more closely with the rest of the desktop and mobile open source community. The summit presents a unique opportunity for main actors to work together and improve the free and open source desktop for all.

“We are proud to be able to welcome the participants of the Desktop Summit 2011 to the capital region next year,” says Almuth Nehring-Venus, Permanent Secretary for Economics, Technology and Women’s Issues from the Berlin Senate. “I hope that the joint conference of the two largest Free Desktop projects GNOME and KDE will provide an additional boost for our Open Source/Open Standard initiative within the framework of Berlin?s IT strategy and therefore also to further high-value jobs in our region.”

At the Desktop Summit 2011, KDE and GNOME expect well over a thousand core contributors, prominent open source technology leaders, representatives from government, education and corporate backgrounds, and open source desktop engineers, usability experts and designers. Local and international IT industry are invited to learn about and join in developing the latest innovative desktop technology. The TSB Innovation Agency Berlin GmbH and the Berlin Senate are supporting the event locally.

The registration for the Desktop Summit will open on 1 February 2011 and a call for papers will be issued. Talk submissions will be due on 15th of March and on 15 April the conference program will be announced. Saturday 6 August kicks off three days of joint keynotes, talks and social events followed by four days of collaborative workshops. The conference officially ends on Friday, 12 August with a closing.

GNOME 3.0 Rescheduled for March 2011 Release

The Hague, July 28, 2010 – The GNOME Release Team met at GUADEC on Monday, July 26 and discussed the state of readiness for GNOME 3.0. During these discussions the Release Team decided that GNOME 3.0 needed another release cycle to mature and have pushed back the GNOME 3.0 release to March 2011.

GNOME releases every six months to provide a reliable platform for its community and downstream partners. While it might be possible to release GNOME 3.0 in 2010 by slipping the schedule by a month or two, it makes more sense to stick to GNOME’s release schedule and ensure that GNOME 3.0 lives up to the quality that our community expects.

The GNOME Project will ship GNOME 2.32 in September, along with a preview release of GNOME 3.0. Several of the distributions will ship GNOME 3.0 components that can be used for user previews or developer testing.

GNOME is driven by its goals to provide a quality free software desktop, and we feel that our users and downstream community are better served by holding the GNOME 3.0 release until March 2011. This gives adequate time not only for feature development, but user feedback and testing.

The extra time will be used to improve performance for GNOME Accessibility support, GNOME Shell, and documentation for GNOME 3.0. GNOME 2.32 will still have a number of interesting new features such as color management and UPnP support as well as the usual performance enhancements and bug fixes that have marked GNOME’s timed releases for years.

Stay tuned to the GNOME.org Web site and announcements from the GNOME Project about the status of GNOME 3.0 and what’s coming in 2011.

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

GNOME is a free-software project whose goal is to develop a complete, accessible and easy to use desktop for Linux and Unix-based operating systems. GNOME also includes a complete development environment to create new applications. It is released twice a year on a regular schedule.

The GNOME desktop is used by millions of people around the world. GNOME is a standard part of all leading GNU/Linux and Unix distributions, and is popular with both large existing corporate deployments and millions of small business and home users worldwide.

Composed of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies, the GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME. The Foundation is a member directed, non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to the GNOME project and helps determine its vision and roadmap.

More information about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be found at www.gnome.org andfoundation.gnome.org.

Media Enquiries

GUADEC is first event worldwide streamed in WebM by Flumotion and Fluendo

The Hague, July 27, 2010 – The GNOME Foundation is happy to announce that Flumotion is providing the live streaming in WebM of this year’s GUADEC conference, July 28-30. It is the first conference worldwide that will be streamed in the new WebM format, based on the VP8 codec, released as open source by Google last May.

Flumotion, a leading company in multi-format streaming technology, and Fluendo, an established leading provider of multimedia software, are both committed to the integration of open source formats and standards in their multi-format software. Within 20 hours of VP8’s release, Fluendo integrated the new codec, which was then included into Flumotion’s multi-format streaming software and streaming platform, only 48 hours after the release by Google.

“The speed of the VP8 integration illustrates the benefits of multi-format and open source based technology”, explains Julien Moutte, founder of the Fluendo Group, which consists of Flumotion, Fluendo and Fluendo Embedded. “We are proud to provide the world’s first live streaming in WebM for the GNOME’s foundation annual event”, he adds.

“We’re pleased that GUADEC has the honour of being the first event to be streamed live in WebM”, says Stormy Peters, GNOME Foundation Executive Director. “Allowing GNOME developers and users around the world to see GUADEC via WebM only months after its release shows how fast the open source community adopts new formats and drives technological innovation.”

Truly open formats, without patent encumbrance or license fees, are crucial for an open Web. Free software projects like GNOME can stand on a level playing field with proprietary software, and deliver full functionality for users on free software platforms.

The GUADEC conference is at the core of the open source movement and is the biggest gathering of developers of the GNOME project, a desktop environment and graphical user interface, used by businesses and governments worldwide. This year’s lectures focus is on developing products based on GNOME, demand from public institutions for a work environment based on free and open source software, and attracting talent to the open source culture and the industry surrounding it.

About Flumotion

Flumotion offers multi-format streaming solutions for the delivery of audio and video services over the Internet. Started in 2006 by a group of open source developers and multimedia experts as a Free Software project, Flumotion combines an innovative open source software package with GStreamer, the de facto multimedia framework on Linux.

Thanks to its flexible and distributed design and its choice of Python as the high-level language for development, it is now the world’s easiest and most powerful streaming software and platform for open streaming. Flumotion’s end-to-end technology covers the entire streaming value chain and enables streaming in open as well as proprietary formats. Live and on demand streaming for new formats and devices is integrated in record time such as WebM, iPad and Android. Learn more atwww.flumotion.com.

About Fluendo

Founded in 2004 in Barcelona, Fluendo specializes in software development and consulting services. Fluendo employs several of the central developers of the GStreamer multimedia framework, which is quickly establishing itself as the de-facto standard multimedia framework for GNU/Linux and UNIX systems. Fluendo provides a wide range of products under and above GStreamer including proprietary codecs (together with their respective patent licenses), a streaming server, a DVD player, the Fluendo Media Center for Linux, and Moovida Pro media player for Windows.

Fluendo is an established leading provider of multimedia software and has succeeded in offering legal end-to-end solutions working with multiple formats and platforms. Fluendo, Influencing the Multimedia World. Learn more at www.fluendo.com.

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

GNOME is a free-software project whose goal is to develop a complete, accessible and easy to use desktop for Linux and Unix-based operating systems. GNOME also includes a complete development environment to create new applications. It is released twice a year on a regular schedule.

The GNOME desktop is used by millions of people around the world. GNOME is a standard part of all leading GNU/Linux and Unix distributions, and is popular with both large existing corporate deployments and millions of small business and home users worldwide.

Composed of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies, the GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME. The Foundation is a member directed, non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to the GNOME project and helps determine its vision and roadmap.

More information about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be found at www.gnome.org andfoundation.gnome.org.

About WebM and VP8

The WebM project (www.webmproject.org) is dedicated to developing a high-quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to everyone. WebM is an open, royalty-free media file format designed for the web. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec (www.vorbis.org). The WebM file structure is based on the Matroska (www.matroska.org) media container.The WebM launch is supported by Mozilla, Opera, Adobe, Google and more than forty other publishers, software and hardware vendors.

Media Enquiries

Stormy’s Update: Week of July 19, 2010

Tomboy Online on the big screen at OSCON. Photo by PaulScott56 http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulscott56/4815513721/

OSCON! Gave “Pick up the Poop” keynote that was a call to all those who care about free software to start thinking about our freedoms when it comes to web services.

At OSCON I was on a panel about financial incentives in open source.  I met a couple of people from Malaysia involved in promoting free software there. After mentioning them in many talks, it was great to actually meet them!

Also at OSCON, organized web services and free software lightning talks and met with many people including Jennifer Minor from Venier – they use GNOME in educational scientific devices. Went out with GNOME folks organized by Sri Ramkrishna!

Traveled to the Hague to attend GUADEC next week. (As well as to OSCON and back. Quite a bit of travel for one week!)

Attended GNOME Board Meeting in the Hague on Sunday. It was a very productive day. We got through a very impressive agenda discussing many issues from bank accounts to hackfests to annual goals. Look for the minutes after GUADEC for more details.

Tomboy Online on the big screen at OSCON. Photo by PaulScott56 http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulscott56/4815513721/

OSCON! Gave “Pick up the Poop” keynote that was a call to all those who care about free software to start thinking about our freedoms when it comes to web services.

At OSCON I was on a panel about financial incentives in open source.  I met a couple of people from Malaysia involved in promoting free software there. After mentioning them in many talks, it was great to actually meet them!

Also at OSCON, organized web services and free software lightning talks and met with many people including Jennifer Minor from Venier – they use GNOME in educational scientific devices. Went out with GNOME folks organized by Sri Ramkrishna!

Traveled to the Hague to attend GUADEC next week. (As well as to OSCON and back. Quite a bit of travel for one week!)

Attended GNOME Board Meeting in the Hague on Sunday. It was a very productive day. We got through a very impressive agenda discussing many issues from bank accounts to hackfests to annual goals. Look for the minutes after GUADEC for more details.

Stormy’s Update: Week of July 12, 2010

Organized GNOME Advisory Board meeting to discuss topics and plan for our in person meeting at GUADEC. We meet all day on Tuesday. We’ll have some updates and we’ll give each of the advisory board members a chance to present ideas on where we can all collaborate. Set up and sent out agenda for the GUADEC meeting.

Attended GNOME Asia meeting.

Briefly met Amanda from Project Harmony. Will catch up with her at LinuxCon.

Arranged travel for LinuxCon. Reserved hotel for Grace Hopper.

Submitted some expense reports.

Attended GNOME Board of Directors meeting.

Had 1:1 with Rosanna.

Met with a few advisory board members 1:1.

Followed up with some sponsor work for GUADEC. Had a bunch of brief discussions about various issues. Had a meeting to discuss the format of the Open Desktop Day at GUADEC. (Open as in not closed, as opposed to open software instead of free software.)

Prepared for OSCON. (Keynote, panel, organizing lightning talks, arranged meetings, etc.)

Set up interviews with the KDE and GNOME boards for the people that submitted bids to host the Desktop Summit 2011.

Had some good quality family time.

This week:

  • Attending OSCON: Keynote, panel and organizing lightning talks plus several get togethers and meetings.
  • Traveling to The Hague.
  • Working on LinuxCon keynote.
  • Last minute GUADEC preparations.
  • Missing my family.

Stormy’s update: June 14th-July 12th, 2010

My weekly update routine has been broken. I used to write my update every Monday morning. However, now when I sit down on Monday morning I usually have several hundred unread messages. So I am working on a new routine for writing my updates. (And trying to figure out if I’m getting more email than normal or more email on weekends or what.) In the mean time, here’s what I’ve been up to:

  • Had an interview with James Turner as a prelude to my OSCON keynote.
  • Participated in several GNOME Asia Summit planning meetings. The conference is coming along well!
  • Had regular 1:1’s with Brian Cameron.
  • Had regular 1:1’s with Rosanna Yuen.
  • Attended board meetings. Participated in board discussions.
  • Worked on setting up lightning talks on web services and free software for OSCON.
  • Worked on setting up lightning talks on Getting Things Done in GNOME for GUADEC.
  • Helped with GUADEC planning stuff mostly budget, sponsors and some general planning. We had some last minute staff changes as one staff member got too ill to continue.
  • We did a joint press release with Sugar Labs as the new OLPC will also have GNOME on it. (Sugar also uses GNOME technologies.)
  • Contacted all the groups that submitted bids to host the Desktop Summit 2011, sent them our questions and asked them to update their bids and make them public. Ended up with two bids. The boards (KDE and GNOME) will now interview them.
  • Had a couple of meetings with GNOME advisory board members. I hope to catch them all in person 1:1 during GUADEC.
  • Sent out several emails about the GNOME Training at GUADEC to our advisory board members. Several expressed interest in getting it incorporated in their regular corporate training.
  • Attended the Transfer Summit. Gave a talk on GNOME, attended a Foundations BOF and lots of interesting discussions.
  • Worked on signing up a new GNOME advisory board member. To be announced later. 😉
  • GNOME was accepted into the YouTube nonprofit program. Stay tuned for what we do with that space. Probably starting with GUADEC and taking off with GNOME 3.
  • And answered the kazillion emails, IMs and IRCs. So feel free to ping me if you have questions!

GNOME Targets Wider Audience at GUADEC

July 1, 2010 — The organisational committee of GUADEC 2010, the annual GNOME Users And Developers European Conference, has scheduled two extra sessions, to be held immediately before the main conference, which are expected to draw wide and international audiences.

The GNOME Open Desktop Day and the GNOME Developers Training aim to expose newcomers – particularly governments, businesses, and developers – to the plethora of open source software possibilities. These events will be of great interest for ICT companies, public sector organisations and entrepreneurs interested in exploring opportunities and development of open source and GNOME-based products.

GNOME is the desktop environment installed by default in many Linux, Unix and BSD environments.

The additional sessions will take place on Monday and Tuesday, the 26th and 27th of July, in The Hague, The Netherlands. The main GUADEC conference will be held on the 28th-30th of July.

GUADEC 2010 marks the conference’s 11th year. This is the first year it will be held in The Netherlands. GUADEC has previously been held in locations such as Paris, Copenhagen, Birmingham, Istanbul and Seville. Conference organisors expect more than 500 attendees to participate over the week. Speakers for the conference include leading names from the open source development community and representatives from leading companies and public institutions in the open source area.

For more information on the event and registration, please visit the official GUADEC website:http://www.guadec.org/.

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

GNOME is a free-software project whose goal is to develop a complete, accessible and easy to use desktop for Linux and Unix-based operating systems. GNOME also includes a complete development environment to create new applications. It is released twice a year on a regular schedule.

The GNOME desktop is used by millions of people around the world. GNOME is a standard part of all leading GNU/Linux and Unix distributions, and is popular with both large existing corporate deployments and millions of small business and home users worldwide.

Composed of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies, the GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME. The Foundation is a member directed, non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to the GNOME project and helps determine its vision and roadmap.

More information about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be found at www.gnome.org andfoundation.gnome.org.

Media Enquiries

This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0.