July 2013 – GNOME Foundation

GUADEC 2013 Starts Tomorrow

By Jan Symon (Jan Symon) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Members of the GNOME project are gathering in Brno, Czech Republic, for their annual European conference (GUADEC). The event starts on Thursday 1 August. There will be four core days of presentations, including talks on Linux gaming, Wayland, design, GTK+, documentation, LibreOffice, application sandboxing, and much much more. The full schedule can be found on the GUADEC website.

This is the main GNOME event of the year and, as with every year, is set to be educational, inspiring and a lot of fun.

For those who are already in Brno, a welcome event is being held today Ventana Café between 16:00 and 21:00. This is right across the the street from this year’s venue at the Faculty of Information Technology. Drinks and snacks will be provided, and conference badges will be handed out.

If you won’t be at GUADEC this year, don’t worry: you can follow all the action online. There will be regular reports on gnome.org (subscribe here). You can also keep track of the conference on Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus. Just follow the GNOME account, and look out for the #guadec hashtag.

Interview with Gavin Ferris, GNOME Privacy Campaign Donor

GNOME recently raised $20,000 to fund security and privacy enhancements to our software. We are extremely excited by this, and want to thank everyone who contributed.

One person who we are especially grateful to is Gavin Ferris, who was a particularly generous contributor to the fund raising campaign. We recently spoke to Gavin about his reasons for donating to GNOME.

How long have you been using GNOME, Gavin?

About 6 years ago, I began dual-booting my Windows laptops with Ubuntu, so I first started using GNOME 2 then. I stuck with Ubuntu until about nine months ago, when the whole shopping lens and “We have root” thing made me uneasy about the direction Canonical was heading. I tried a few other distros at that point, and selected Gentoo; now all my development boxes run it with GNU/Linux and Gnome 3.6.3, other than a few headless servers running a stock Debian install.

We’re really interested to hear about why you chose to donate to GNOME. Why donate now?

For community-based, open-source development to work smoothly, a number of key frameworks have to exist. The ‘desktop’ GUI (and supporting ecosystem) is, of course, [one] such key framework. It’s vital that a vendor- and distro-independent offering is available in this space which provides: a) a great (i.e., modern and feature-rich) experience to the user, and b) a supportive, structured development platform for the programmer; and I think GNOME fills both roles well…

I believe those of us who can afford to contribute financially—and who value using free and open-source software on a daily basis—should be willing to do so. Also, seen through the, ahem, prism of recent news, GNOME’s privacy campaign is timely and its philosophy refreshing. Hence my decision to donate.

Do you have a favorite thing about GNOME?

The shell extensions architecture is cool, and I think it has finessed many of the usability criticisms originally levelled at GNOME 3, without making the overall system too fragmented.

What would you like to see in GNOME in the future?

Two things spring to mind (bear in mind I’m on 3.6.3 – but having read the reviews I think these are still relevant for 3.8):

First, I think it’d be great to offer the user a clear choice about what data gets transmitted by installed software components, across the network and between each other, in a way that is easy to use and proactive. … such a feature would be an important differentiator unique selling proposition for GNOME. I’m hopeful the proposed privacy enhancements will provide at least some of this functionality.

Second, I think a major issue with GNOME is its lack of an integrated “software-centre” application properly linked into the Activities-view search… I guess this is really kind of a convoluted upvote for GNOME Software 🙂

Those are the main things I’d like to see in GNOME. But the main thing I’d like to see GNOME in are my phone and tablet! Hey, if Ubuntu can do it…

Thanks Gavin!

Once again we’d like to thank Gavin for his generous donation, as well as taking the time to speak to us.

Thirteen Years of GUADEC

GUADEC (pronounced GWAH-DECK), is GNOME’s annual European conference, and is the main GNOME event of the year. With the 14th GUADEC about to start, we decided to revisit some conferences of the past, and take a look at the origins of the event.

GNOME’s annual European conference was first envisioned in the early days of the GNOME Project when a number of contributors, who had until then only been connected through the internet, decided that they should meet in real life. With diligent fundraising from various Free Software companies in the United States, Germany and France, the organizers managed to raise enough money to sponsor around 40 of the core GNOME developers to meet in Paris, France, for four days. That first GUADEC conference occurred in 2000, and it has been held every year since.

The very first GUADEC, held in Paris in 2000

Since that first event, GUADEC has grown from strength to strength. The conference brings GNOME contributors and enthusiasts together from all over the world, and gives them an opportunity to share their experiences and ideas. It attracts several hundred software developers, users, artists, and representatives from businesses, governments and education. Presentations are given by leaders, spokespeople, volunteers and motivated developers on a range of topics including development techniques, new features, plans for the future, and ideas on technology and culture.

Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions and hackfests were added to the conference schedule in 2008, and have become a permanent fixture. These sessions provide contributors the chance to work together and devise development strategies and techniques. The conference is a community event, and is organized each year by a team of local enthusiasts. Each year, groups are able to apply to host the next event. Bidding is currently underway for GUADEC 2015.

To date, there have been 13 GUADEC conferences. Each event was held in a different European city. GUADEC has visited Paris (2000), Copenhagen (2001), Seville (2002), Dublin (2003), Kirstiansand (2004), Stuttgart (2005), Vilanova (2006), Birmingham (2007), Istanbul (2008), Gran Canaria (2009), The Hague (2010), Berlin (2011) and A Coruña (2012). This GUADEC will be held in Brno, Czech Republic, a bustling university town and home to major offices from a wide variety of technology companies including IBM, Motorola, Honeywell and Red Hat.

GUADEC is a serious occasion, and is a place where important discussions happen. It is not however just a software conference. GUADEC offers the chance for contributors who work together over the web to get together, have fun and socialise, and it lets people catch up with old friends, as well as make new ones.

Over the years, GUADEC has accumulated a number of annual traditions. An annual football match is a regular occurrence, as is the presentation of the GNOME “pants” award. In GUADECs gone by, it was typical for GNOME contributors to form a band that would play (sometimes well, usually not so well) at one of the conference social events.

One of the outings of the GUADEC band (Copyright Jesús Corrius, CC BY)

For a time, the annual GUADEC ice cream eating contest was the stuff of legend. On one memorable occasion, this was somewhat unwisely organized to occur in conjunction with a boat party, which ferried brave GNOMEies up and down the Bosphorus strait as they attempted to finish whole tubs of frosty goodness in record time.

One of the GUADEC Ice Cream Death Match competitions (Copyright penguincakes, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

And, of course, GNOME’s annual event would not be complete without the project’s notorious sense of humor. This often leads to mischief…

Never trust someone else to write your slides for you (Copyright Allan Day, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) — Never trust someone else to write your slides for you

Here’s to GUADEC 2013…

GUADEC Keynote Speaker: Cathy Malmrose

Cathy Malmrose discovered Free Software in 2007, when her son showed her Ubuntu. She realized that she could build computers optimized for GNU/Linux, and now runs ZaReason, a company which sells computers preloaded with Linux. Now ZaReason has opened its first shop in Berkley, CA and is poised to launch ZaTab, a Linux tablet.

We are lucky to have Cathy speaking at this year’s GUADEC conference, and she recently took the time to speak to us about ZaReason and the upcoming conference.

Zareason states that it aims to showcase GNU/Linux as the superior operating system. What are your thoughts about the ethics of free operating systems and providing hardware that just works out of the box for customers?

I am not an idealist. Free and open just makes sense. In so many aspects of life, lockdown only leads to longterm misery.

Take the food industry for example. If we allowed the manufacturers to do their work behind closed doors, can you imagine the types of things they would put in our food to save money? Even with the food industry being open, there are still problems. Think pink sludge (scraps of meat treated with ammonia) or grocery store items with a list of ingredients that read like a chemical biology textbook. At least with legally mandated openness they have to tell us what they put in the food so we can make an informed choice.

Some people compare the electronics industry to other sectors (such as the auto industry) and advocate for closed source using safety and security as their main reasoning. While I can see their point, I believe that proprietary development is short-sighted. My personal experience has been that the decision to make code proprietary always comes from a money-first position. Bad decisions are made when money rules over the long-term well-being of the code base.

I believe that free and open is the easiest and most effective way to keep our hardware working properly (and keep it honestly secure). Long-term.

What can we expect from your keynote at GUADEC?

I have given it a lot of though re: “What could we talk about that would result in further growth and acceptance of GNOME as world-class, something that could benefit people in general?” I will give OEM-level insight + some non-developer user-level insight of future GNOME users. Half will be practical, next-step information and half will be long-term view. Hopefully it will get developers and GNOME Foundation team members thinking about (and answering) questions for the community and the public at large.

Also, I like to do a Trivia test at the end of each talk I give. I usually ask questions about women in early computing. It helps people be more aware of women’s contributions in the early years, something many people wouldn’t even listen to otherwise. I will be giving away a few Tux keyboards (as many as will fit in my luggage, probably just two). I have done the Trivia thing at a dozen other talks, both big and small and it is always fun. It’s corny but I love it.

What do you expect from GUADEC?

I expect to meet lots of great people. I want to hear insights and opinions from the GNOME community.

We at GNOME are committed to making Free Software world as inclusive as possible to women. Have you encountered challenges as a successful women in Free Software?

To be honest, I don’t give it much thought. I have been lucky to work with men who are respectful and generous. Of course people I meet often assume I don’t know much, but that usually helps me learn more in the end.

My view on encouraging more women to enter the tech sector is simply to encourage “a programmer’s way of thinking.” In much of what I read for my daughter, girls are often encouraged to: 1. ask a friend for help (rather than solve it herself), 2. complain, or 3. give up.We need to teach our girls and women to switch their thought processes to: 1. hammer the problem yourself until you understand it, 2. don’t complain, just make your best guess, and 3. be so persistent that you wouldn’t even consider giving up as an option. It doesn’t have to be their main way of approaching the world, but a person has to be capable of it. Until a person, female or male, can think like a coder, there’s not much use in encouraging them to enter the tech sector.

As a product reseller, what would you like to see from GNOME?

First, I cringe at the thought of being a “product reseller” for many, many reasons. I hope you don’t mind if I reframe the question?

What do you think we all could do to better position GNOME and other Free Software as something desirable, high-end? Essentially still the same question but without the reseller concept. Quick rant on reseller concept: a reseller simply repackages something for the public. We do so much more than just pre-load a distro!! When people say that’s all we do, it dismisses all our hard work in other areas and wow, that doesn’t feel good. Since the goal is to motivate each other to do good things, I like to stay away from that concept as much as possible and just focus on building cool stuff. Thanks.

The free and open community has had many turning points but the current one, secure boot, hits “below the belt” at the OEM level. I believe GNOME is the best positioned out of anyone in the F/LOSS community. There is so much potential and strength in what the GNOME Foundation + developers have built.

I can easily picture a future where the GNOME distro ships on many different types of devices, laptops, tablets, desktops, servers, the works. Full distro, full package, nothing to hinder use by the other 99% of society. My ideal end goal would be to hear someone say, “Yeah, I use GNOME,” with a level of pride, admiration, and adoration-for-quality that a Mac fanboy would use (if Mac fanboys were cool).

What are you looking forward to most about GUADEC?

Not sure. Everything?

Find out more about Cathy and ZaReason at zareason.com and come to GUADEC to meet her in person!

GNOME raises $20,000 to enhance security and privacy

Last weekend the GNOME project reached its goal of raising $20,000 to help make our software even more secure and privacy aware. We are hugely excited by this, and would like to say a big thank you to everyone who donated.

The GNOME project is passionate about protecting our user’s privacy and security, and every dollar of the money raised through this campaign will be channeled into development activities.

Just like with our previous campaign, which raised money to make GNOME more accessible, the GNOME Foundation will be allocating the funds raised through a bidding process. Anyone can apply will their proposals for how to enhance GNOME security and privacy. Areas that we are interested in pursuing include:

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, the GNOME browser

Details of the bidding process will be announced as soon as possible, so watch this space. Thanks again to everyone who donated!

The GNOME Foundation invites proposals to host GUADEC 2015.

GUADEC is the biggest gathering of GNOME users and developers, which takes place in Europe every year. It includes conference days, the GNOME Foundation annual general meeting and hacking in a week of coding and discussion. To make organizing GUADEC easier, GNOME selects the location two years in advance.
Teams wishing to organize GUADEC in their city should let the board know of their intent to submit a bid by August 1, 2013 by e-mail to foundation-announce@gnome.org and board-list@gnome.org, indicating their availability to meet during this year’s GUADEC to discuss it with the GNOME Foundation board. Final bids will be due by September 30, 2013

Keep in mind that a good candidate should meet the following criteria:

easily accessed by plane or train
motivated local team, preferably with experience in event organisation
a venue available to host the event
good options for lunches (catering, student restaurant…)
affordable accommodation and places to eat in the evening
space for informal talks and impromptu hacking
local industry and government support

Bids from previous years are available for reference. Also be aware that while organizing a conference such as GUADEC is a huge undertaking, people from the GNOME community have been there before you and will be there to help you. You can find more information at https://wiki.gnome.org/GUADEC including a How To for writing a bid and an overview of the kinds of things you should include in the proposal.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the foundation board at board-list@gnome.org.

GUADEC Keynote Speaker: Ethan Lee

You might know Ethan Lee, also known as flibitijibibo, from his work porting games as Super Hexagon and Proteus to Linux, or from his big collection of game soundtracks. Ethan is currently working on a new exciting project, which soon will be shipped: FEZ for Linux, a game that people might have seen in Indie Game: The Movie.

Ethan is also one of this year’s GUADEC keynote speakers, and the first we’re going to meet during this series of interviews.

Q: Hi Ethan! Your work in porting games to Linux is really impressive! Which road brought you there?

A: The short answer: Presumably the road that Mr. Bean takes to get to each of his adventures. I started out as a music educator, and 4 years later I am now here. Explain that! 😛

The long answer: I started doing music education when I was in high school, since that seemed like a “stable” career, then I decided to take a shot at music production when I went to college. After about 2 years of that I got a bit bored and started working on a game engine, with emphasis on audio tech. I would “ship” a tech demo a year later to crickets and white noise, but I sent that demo to Eden Industries asking if they wanted my audio tech in their game, and they said yes. Of course, instead of doing that, I ended up porting the game, and that caused the eventual portfolio you see today.

As for simply _using_ Linux, I really only started using it around Fall of 2010. I had poked around it with virtual machines when I was younger, but I only ever took it seriously once I was in college and had the time to invest in learning my way around it.

Q: What can we expect from your keynote at GUADEC?

A: I’m still not entirely sure myself. All I can be sure of at the moment is that there won’t be slides. Maybe like, one or two. If I do something with the screen, it’ll probably be a bit more involved than that…

Q: What do you expect from GUADEC?

A: No idea! I’m usually going to stuff like MAGFest, so when I got an invitation to GUADEC I had to look it up and find the schedule from 2012… then I almost went “oh, no!” as my field of interest seemed a bit “dumb” compared to what everyone else has been doing at GUADEC. That might make the keynote interesting for everyone else though. So I suppose I’ll be expecting to learn a lot about things I currently take for granted.

Q: There seems to be a lot of interest in gaming on Linux at the moment. Why do you think that is?

The surge in Linux gaming honestly looks like the second year of a major console, where all the games suddenly start pouring in and there’s finally a reason to buy the darned thing. Except, instead of 2 years, it was more like 20. Hopefully it won’t be another 10 years to get to year 3 when the console starts to live a bit more comfortably, but we’ll see.

There are definitely other factors to consider in there (Windows 8, perpetual closedness of current console platforms, etc.), but none of that would have really mattered if game devs didn’t take that first step of making Linux versions of their games.

Q: What are you looking forward to most about GUADEC??

A: Meeting people who may actually know who I am! Particularly in Europe… I must confess, this will be my first trip to Europe ever, so I’m a bit glad that I’ve got some grand purpose for being there. Considering most of the e-mails I get are from Europe, it only feels right that my first speaking appearance as a Linux game developer happens over there.

It’ll also be interesting to be around the “hardcore” Linux software developers. Games are always put up as such a big deal, but then I look at some of the stuff that goes on at the level below mine and realize that pretty much everyone at GUADEC will likely be smarter than silly old me. Ah, now that’s something to expect from my keynote, I think: more “artsy” stuff over “technical”. I think I’d bore everyone with the latter. We want new, different things, right? Yeah, let’s do that.

Find out more about Ethan at his personal website http://www.flibitijibibo.com and come to GUADEC to meet him in person!

GNOME Receives Hardware Donations to Assist with High-Definition Support

Photo by David King

The GNOME Foundation has received several generous donations of laptops, which will be made available to contributors to assist with ongoing work on high-definition display support.

High-definition displays offer a significant improvement over traditional hardware, and are set to become increasingly popular in the future. GNOME is working to ensure that our software works well with them, and takes advantage of the opportunities they offer.

One of the donated laptops was provided by Brion Vibber, a GNOME user and supporter. Five more machines came from Intel’s Open Source Technology Center (OTC).

“Intel is excited about the possibilities that the next generation of high resolution Ultrabooks® will provide to their users,” says Dirk Hohndel, Intel’s Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist. “Accelerating better support for these systems by donating a few systems to the Gnome Foundation is just one of many ways in which we support the open source community.”

These donations provide a major boost to GNOME’s ongoing high-definition work. This is taking place over several areas of the Free Software stack, with GNOME contributors investing in and collaborating with other Free Software projects. Improvements have already been committed to Wayland as a result of this donated hardware.

The GNOME Project would like to thank Brion and Intel for their generous donations and ongoing support.

GUADEC 2013 Program Published

The core program for this year’s GUADEC conference has been announced. GUADEC is the premier GNOME conference, and is being held in Brno, Czech Republic from August 1st to 8th. A total of 40 talks will be held during the core conference days, as well as 4 keynotes and a number of lightning talk sessions.

The four core conference days will be followed by three days of working events and hacking sessions, which will give the GNOME community an opportunity to work and plan together.

More information about this year’s GUADEC can be found on the conference website.