Month: December 2014

Its been both an exciting and challenging year for us, this post includes some of the highlights.

Early in the spring Karen Sandler announced her departure* as the Executive Director of the foundation.

The GNOME Asia Summit, an event with a strong community building focus, was this year hosted in Beijing, China. In the end of July the GNOME community gathered for GUADEC in the beautiful city of Strasbourg, France for a week of talks, discussions and hacking.

Several Hackfest’s took place around the world including the first edition of the West Coast Summit where the growing number of GNOME contributors living in Silicon Valley got together. GNOME was also present at great conferences such as FOSDEM and FSCONS.

We saw two stable GNOME releases, 3.12 & 3.14 where the developer experience took leaps forward with many improvements to GTK+ and the introduction of the inspector while the user experience continued to evolve.

Things took an dramatic turn in November when a legal twist with Groupon became public. The case got much media attention, many were upset of how Groupon had acted; GNOME received strong public support.

Thanks to our contributors GNOME will in 2015 continue innovate pushing Free Software forward.

*Karen now serves the foundation as a member of the board

We are thrilled to report that GNOME.Asia is a founding member of KAIYUANSHE(开源社) launched Oct 16, 2014. KAIYUANSHE roughly translated as “open source alliance,” is a group of enterprises, communities, and individuals in China supporting and promoting free and open source software (FOSS).

KAIYUANSHE will support the growing needs of China’s growing software industry by providing developers with the necessary education, tools and services to foster a healthy and robust free software ecosystem. Additionally providing education on FOSS standards, licensing and verification, development tools, FOSS project assessment and other necessary support and services to organizations, developers and academic institutions.

The GNOME community, represented by GNOME Asia Summit members will actively contribute in the early phases of KAIYUANSHE to many areas including documentation ,media and by participating in the KAIYUANSHE China Campus Tour.

“It’s fantastic that GNOME.Asia is joining KAIYUANSHE as a founding member”, said Karen Sandler, the Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy and currently serving on the GNOME Foundation’s Board of Directors, “I have always been incredibly impressed by the GNOME.Asia team and the great work they have done in spreading free software in Asia. I’m not surprised that KAIYUANSHE is already successful, and I can’t wait to see more of what this initiative accomplishes.”