December 2012 – GNOME Foundation

Help make GNOME safer than ever!

GNOME was founded with the goal of promoting software freedom. We remain committed to the empowerment of our users, and are always looking for ways to improve our software. We want people to be safe, in control, and enriched by the software they use. The GNOME community was inspired by the keynote delivered by Jacob Appelbaum on the topic of privacy at this years’ GUADEC and was reminded of our mission. To this end, GNOME is working on a new campaign focused on privacy. Through this campaign, we aim to enhance GNOME 3 so that it offers one of the most secure computing environments available.

Proceeds from the privacy fundraising campaign will be used to fund development efforts such as:

application containment
enhanced disk encryption support
Tor integration
user control over diagnostic reporting features
robust VPN routing
application integration with system-wide privacy settings
controls for how GNOME devices are identified on local networks
anti-phishing features for Web, GNOME’s web browser

Donate today to help make GNOME safer than ever!

GNOME WebKitGTK+ hackfest

The GNOME Foundation is pleased to announce the conclusion of the WebKitGTK+Hackfest. The hackfest was held December 9-12 and was hosted once again at the Igalia offices in A Coruña, Spain. This hackfest has been very successful with more than twenty attendees from Igalia, Collabora, Adobe, Intel, Samsung and Red Hat.

WebKitGTK+ hackfest 2012 picture by Joone Hur

The hackfest was extremely productive, and highlights of the tasks that were worked on there include:

Many improvements in Web, the GNOME web browser: a new incognito mode to minimize the risk of being tracked both on the internet and in your own computer, a slick new UI for the search, revamping the creation of Web applications by selecting better icons and names, adding undo close tabs, preventing empty download-only windows and preliminary work for the integration of the Document Viewer in the browser.
Switching from Pango to Harfbuzz to render complex text.
Porting the WebAudio backend to GStreamer 1.0.
Better DOM bindings.
Many bugs fixed for accelerated compositing with Clutter, both in ELF and GTK+ ports.
Stabilization of the libsoup API.
Improvements in the memory use of the V8 Javascript engine.
2D-canvas accelerated support using Cairo OpenGL.
Better HTML5 media controls.
A new API to retrieve a screenshots from web pages.
Progress in accessibility support.
Documentation.

The GNOME Foundation and community are very grateful to the sponsors of this event:

GNOME.Asia 2013 to be held in Korea

The GNOME Foundation is pleased to announce that Seoul has been selected as the venue for the upcoming GNOME.Asia Summit 2013.

The Asia Summit organizing team was very impressed with the Korean local organizers’ proposal. The GNOME community in Seoul is committed to GNOME’s success and to promoting the use of GNOME and GNU/Linux in Korea and the rest of Asia. The local community has been very active, organizing monthly events called “The GNOME Tech Talks & Hackfest”.

Seoul is a convenient and exciting place to hold the conference. With great public transportation and solid international flight connections, it will be easy for attendees to travel to the event. Seoul also has great tourist attractions, many universities with strong student communities, and is home to many of Korea’s largest technology companies. Interest in Free and Open Source Software is growing more than ever in Korea. The organizing team believes that hosting the event in Seoul will expand GNOME’s presence and increase participation in the area.

“We are excited about the high level of interest in GNOME in Asian countries. By having an annual GNOME event in Asia, we further our goal of spreading Free Software and provide venues for GNOME collaboration,” said Karen Sandler, the Executive Director of GNOME.

“The conference will allow interested parties to discuss the then released GNOME 3.8, the future of GNOME, as well as other topics, especially concerning the needs of GNOME developers in Asia,” said Simon YoungKi Hong, lead of the local organizing team. “With various stakeholders of different aspects in GNOME, the conference will be a great opportunity to celebrate and discuss features and enhancements to GNOME.”

The conference will be held this summer. More information will be posted on the website gnome.asia as the event is planned.

We would like to thank everyone who participated in the GNOME.Asia 2013 bidding process, especially the great work from Team GNOME Seoul and Team GNOME Beijing!

GNOME 2010-2011 Annual Report

The Web Version of the GNOME 2010-11 Annual Report is available for download (2.4 MB, PDF).

The report, initially made available at the annual GNOME Foundation’s membership meeting, is a summary of GNOME community’s activities for the two years from 2010 to 2011. These years have been very exciting. A lot of love and energy was focused on releasing GNOME 3 which is the cornerstone of GNOME’s new vision of the free desktop that the project will be improving and polishing in the coming years.

The report includes several articles about the transition to GNOME 3, accounts of various community activities and events around the world, interviews with GNOME Foundation members, and general information about GNOME Foundation development.

The GNOME 2010-11 Report is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license 3.0.