Month: April 2011

April 26, 2011 — BOSTON, Mass. — The GNOME 3.0 release has far more contributions by women than any previous release in GNOME history. This is largely thanks to the hard work of the first round of the Outreach Program for Women interns, who participated in the program from December 15, 2010 to March 15, 2011. All eight participants had their work included in the main branches of their projects and therefore included in GNOME 3.0. Following on the heels of the successful first round, the GNOME Project is delighted to announce the participants of a new round of the Outreach Program for Women internships.

The accomplishments of the first round participants make everyone in the GNOME community proud:

• Luciana Fujii Pontello made Cheese webcam application capabilities available to other applications as a stand-alone library, and Laura Elisa Lucas Alday added support for SVG overlay effects and made a number of usability improvements. On completing her internship, Luciana Fujii Pontello became the maintainer of the Cheese project.
• Tiffany Antopolski and Natalia Ruz wrote a large amount of GNOME 3 user help and participated in the User Help Hackfest in Toronto in March.
• Chandni Verma made numerous improvements to the multi-user chat in Empathy, participated in the GNOME 3.0 Hackfest, and delivered a well-received talk about her work at the GNOME.Asia Summit in Bangalore in April.
• Hellyna Ng implemented multiple features for notifications in GNOME Shell.
• Eugenia Gabrielova made major improvements to searching in the Anjuta IDE, and Nanci de Brito Bonfim improved debugger integration.

Thanks to generous sponsors, Collabora, Google, Mozilla and the GNOME Foundation, GNOME was able to accept eight strong candidates for the new round. These eight women from North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Asia will be working on GNOME documentation, accessibility, art and localization from May 23 to August 22, 2011.

In addition to the eight Outreach Program for Women participants, the GNOME Project accepted seven female participants for Google Summer of Code, out of a total of 27 participants. This is an unprecedented number of female participants in Google Summer of Code for GNOME. In fact, the women’s outreach effort in GNOME was originally motivated by the lack of female applicants for Google Summer of Code. Scheduling the two internship programs to run in parallel allowed GNOME to encourage women who qualified for Google Summer of Code to apply for it as well. All women who applied for Google Summer of Code in 2011 found mentors and project ideas, made a first contribution, and navigated the application process with the help of the resources available through the Outreach Program for Women.

Cat Allman, Program Manager at the Open Source Programs Office at Google, says: “In a perfect world, outreach programs like the GNOME Outreach Program for Women would not be necessary. Until then, Google is proud to help support the work of the GNOME Project to involve more women in Free and Open Source Software development, and its continued participation in Google Summer of Code.”

“We were impressed by the accomplishments of Luciana Fujii Pontello and Chandni Verma, who we mentored in the previous round,” says Robert McQueen, Director and Co-Founder of Collabora. “We are happy to continue our support of this excellent initiative from the GNOME Project with both our sponsorship and mentorship.”

Mozilla joins Google and Collabora this year as a corporate sponsor of the program. “Mozilla is thrilled to be able to sponsor some promising new talent in the area of accessibility,” says David Bolter, Senior Software Engineer at Mozilla and a mentor for the program. “I really look forward to working with these dedicated and capable interns and helping them achieve great results.”

After completing the previous round as an intern and becoming the maintainer of the Cheese project, Luciana Fujii Pontello will be mentoring this round’s Google Summer of Code participant Raluca Elena Podiuc. “The GNOME Outreach Program for Women was crucial in my becoming a GNOME contributor,” says Fujii Pontello. “I believe it can bring more women to contribute to Free Software and I am happy to help this goal by mentoring one talented woman in Google Summer of Code.”

All of the accepted participants have used GNOME before, are avid Free Software users, and made a substantive contribution to GNOME as part of the application process. The participants will work remotely from home, guided by a mentor and communicating with other contributors over Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The community will be able to follow participants’ progress through their blog updates about their work that will be aggregated on Planet GNOME.

The Outreach Program for Women interns, as well as their location, project, and mentor(s), are:

• Aline Duarte Bessa, Salvador, Brazil – Accessibility, Documentation – David Bolter and Joanmarie Diggs
• Meg Ford, Chicago, USA – Accessibility, Art – David Bolter and Andreas Nilsson
• Ekaterina Gerasimova, Berlin, Germany – Documentation – Shaun McCance
• Julita Inca, Lima, Peru – Documentation – Phil Bull
• Yu Liansu, Beijing, China – Art – Andreas Nilsson
• Priscilla Mahlangu, Pretoria, South Africa – Localization – Friedel Wolff
• Anita Reitere, Riga, Latvia – Documentation – Phil Bull
• Kelly Sinnott, Las Vegas, USA – Documentation – Shaun McCance

Google Summer of Code female interns, as well as their location, project, and mentor, are:

• Tiffany Antopolski, Toronto, Canada – Empathy – Danielle Madeley
• Tamara Atanasoska, Skopje, Republic of Macedonia – Anjuta – Johannes Schmid
• Neha Doijode, Karnataka, India – GNOME Shell – Marina Zhurakhinskaya
• Nohemi Fernandez, Chicago, USA – GNOME Shell – Dan Winship
• Raluca Elena Podiuc, Bucharest, Romania – Cheese – Luciana Fujii Pontello
• Srishti Sethi, Rajasthan, India – GCompris – Bruno Coudoin
• Madhumitha Viswanathan, Chennai, India – GTG – Luca Invernizzi

The Outreach Program for Women is organized by Marina Zhurakhinskaya, with help and support from Máirín Duffy, Stormy Peters, Rosanna Yuen and the GNOME Board of Directors. The essential work is done by the program’s mentors in helping the applicants and eventual participants contribute to their projects. Out of the eight Outreach Program for Women participants, three are being sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, two by Google, two by Mozilla, and one by Collabora. For more information about the Outreach Program for Women, visit http://projects.gnome.org/outreach/women .

The GNOME Project was started in 1997 by two then-university students, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero. Their aim: to produce a free (as in freedom) desktop environment. Since then, GNOME has grown into a hugely successful enterprise. Used by millions of people across the world, it is the most popular desktop environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX-type operating systems. The desktop has been utilized in successful, large-scale enterprise and public deployments, and the project’s developer technologies are utilized in a large number of popular mobile devices.

For further comments and information, contact the GNOME press contact team at gnome-press-contact@gnome.org.

Groton, MA, April 6 2011: Today, the GNOME Desktop project released GNOME 3.0, its most significant redesign of the computer experience in nine years. A revolutionary new user interface and new features for developers make this a historic moment for the free and open source desktop.

Within GNOME 3, GNOME Shell reimagines the user interface for the next generation of the desktop. This innovative interface allows users to focus on tasks while minimizing distractions such as notifications, extra workspaces, and background windows.

Jon McCann, one of GNOME Shell’s designers, says of the design team, “we’ve taken a pretty different approach in the GNOME 3 design that focuses on the desired experience and lets the interface design follow from that.” The result: “With any luck you will feel more focused, aware, effective, capable, respected, delighted, and at ease.” GNOME Shell aims to “help us cope with modern life in a busy world. Help us connect, stay on track, feel at ease and in control.” GNOME Shell, he says, will keep users “informed without being disrupted.”

The GNOME 3 development platform includes improvements in the display backend, a new API, improvements in search, user messaging, system settings, and streamlined libraries. GNOME 2 applications will continue to work in the GNOME 3 environment without modification, allowing developers to move to the GNOME 3 environment at their own pace. The GNOME 3 release notes include further details.

Matt Zimmerman, Ubuntu CTO at Canonical, praises GNOME 3: “In the face of constant change, both in software technology itself and in people’s attitudes toward it, long-term software projects need to reinvent themselves in order to stay relevant. I’m encouraged to see the GNOME community taking up this challenge, responding to the evolving needs of users and questioning the status quo.”

Miguel de Icaza, one of GNOME’s founders, celebrates the new release: “GNOME continues to innovate in the desktop space. The new GNOME Shell is an entire new user experience that was designed from the ground up to improve the usability of the desktop and giving both designers and developers a quick way to improve the desktop and adapt the user interface to new needs. By tightly integrating Javascript with the GNOME platform, designers were able to create and quickly iterate on creating an interface that is both pleasant and exciting to use. I could not be happier with the results.”

GNOME 3 is the cumulative work of five years of planning and design by the GNOME community. McCann notes: “Perhaps the most notable part of the design process is that everything has been done in the open. We’ve had full transparency for every decision (good and bad) and every change we’ve made. We strongly believe in this model. It is not only right in principle — it is just the best way in the long run to build great software sustainably in a large community.”

In partnership with Novell, Red Hat, other distributors, schools and governments, and user groups, GNOME 3 will reach millions of users around the world. Over 3500 people have contributed changes to the project’s code repositories, including the employees of 106 companies. GNOME 3 includes innumerable code changes since the 2.0 release 9 years ago.

Users and fans of GNOME have planned more than a hundred launch parties around the world. Users can download GNOME 3 from http://gnome3.org to try it immediately, or wait for distributions to carry it over the coming months. GNOME 3 continues to push new frontiers in user interaction.

The GNOME Project was started in 1997 by two then-university students, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero. Their aim: to produce a free (as in freedom) desktop environment. Since then, GNOME has grown into a hugely successful enterprise. Used by millions of people across the world, it is the most popular desktop environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX-type operating systems. The desktop has been utilised in successful, large-scale enterprise and public deployments, and the project’s developer technologies are utilised in a large number of popular mobile devices.

For further comments and information, contact the GNOME press contact team at gnome-press-contact@gnome.org.

April 1 (April Fools’ Day), 2011 — BANGALORE, India — The GNOME Release Team met in India this week to discuss the state of GNOME 3. The Release Team came to a consensus opinion that one more cycle will be required before GNOME 3.0 is ready to be released. The decision was communicated to and approved by the GNOME Foundation Board on a conference call.

The delay of the release comes for a number of reasons. The primary indicator of the unreadiness of the release is the massive number of exceptions that have been requested and granted during the hard code freeze period. There have been several last-minute API changes that have the potential to harm the stability of the release.

The recent announcement that the Mozilla project would discontinue support for embedding has cast doubts on the technical underpinnings of the new GNOME shell. There are also concerns about the frequently shifting visual design and questions about its performance and portability. The release team is also concerned about the possible near-future release of GTK4 and what that means for GNOME as a development platform.

Foremost, the GNOME project is committed to only releasing the highest quality software. Dozens of release-critical blocker bugs remain open with little chance of being fixed by the time of the release.

At this time, there will be no new release in the 2.x series and all developer effort will focus on improvements to GNOME 3.0. The release is being delayed for a full 6 months to avoid scheduling problems for our downstream distributors. During this 6 month period, we will reopen module proposals in the usual way. We are particularly encouraging module proposals from alternate desktop shells, which will be given careful consideration.

The Release Team would like to thank the developers who continue to put tremendous amounts of work into the GNOME project. The level of the quality of the code is at the highest that it has ever been and there is no doubt that we will easily have the best desktop on the planet by September 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 and foundation.gnome.org.
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