The GNOME Foundation is excited to announce that GNOME is participating in Google Summer of Code. We have participated every year since the program’s inception, and are proud to share with you our students for 2020!
We want GNOME to be for everyone, regardless of where they come from. To achieve that, we work with contributors from all over the world. The GNOME community in Africa has grown significantly throughout 2019, and we’re excited to help them continue that growth!
Sigu Migwa and StellaMaris Njage spoke at GUADEC 2019 about growing a GNOME community in their home country of Kenya, and the challenges they have to think about. This was the first time many of us learned about what people are doing with GNOME in any African context and this talk brought up concerns we hadn’t considered. However, many of these issues are the same faced by every community looking to grow. While free software is by no means new to Africa, the GNOME community wants to do more in that area.
At the Open Source Source Festival in Lagos, Nigeria, Regina Nkemchor Adejo spoke about desktop applications using GNOME, targeting the experience specifically for the African user.
2020 also brought the launch of the Pan African GNOME Summit, which was postponed due to COVID-19. However, the team is still working on the event and plans to proceed with it when possible.
We want to celebrate what happened in 2019 and so far in 2020, but we know it’s not enough and that we can do more to grow a GNOME community across Africa. A vote to support GNOME in Africa is a vote for building more initiatives across the African continent. Examples of possible activities include:
travel sponsorships to bring people from Africa to GNOME events;
assisting in the organization of events in Africa, including hackfests and conferences;
university outreach targeted at African universities; or
translations specifically for African languages.
The most important thing for us is working with GNOME contributors and members who are already in Africa to bring the GNOME software, project, and community to them in the ways that work for their local communities, and to support their leadership in the best ways we can.
Today, on the 20th of May 2020, the GNOME Foundation, Rothschild Patent Imaging, and Leigh M. Rothschild are pleased to announce that the patent dispute between Rothschild Patent Imaging and GNOME has been settled.
In this walk-away settlement, GNOME receives a release and covenant not to be sued for any patent held by Rothschild Patent Imaging. Further, both Rothschild Patent Imaging and Leigh Rothschild are granting a release and covenant to any software that is released under an existing Open Source Initiative approved license (and subsequent versions thereof), including for the entire Rothschild portfolio of patents, to the extent such software forms a material part of the infringement allegation.
Neil McGovern, Executive Director for the GNOME Foundation said “I’m exceptionally pleased that we have concluded this case. This will allow us to refocus our attention on creating a free software desktop, and will ensure certainty for all free and open source software in future.”
Leigh Rothschild said “I’m pleased that we have managed to settle this issue amicably. I have always supported the innovation of open source software and its developers and encourage its innovation and adoption.”
GNOME was represented pro-bono by Matt Berkowitz, Kieran Kieckhefer, Joy Wang and Larry Crouch from Shearman & Sterling LLP. GNOME and the wider free and open source community owes its thanks and gratitude to their tireless work over the past 10 months.
This spring we’re asking you to help us set our priorities when you donate to the GNOME Foundation. You have the option of asking us to focus on building GNOME in Africa or WebKitGTK development.
WebKitGTK is not only an exciting project for GNOME, but a necessary step in preparing for our GTK4 release. We’ve been growing the project, with a new release just the other day! We have a lot more development to do, and it’s something we are hoping to prioritize. You can let us know if you think WebKitGTK should be a priority by donating today and marking your donation in support of WebKitGTK development.
WebKitGTK is a rendering engine for projects that need any kind of web integration. It can handle HTML/CSS applications and web browsers, and is useful for everything from desktop computers to mobile devices like phones and tablets. We believe the web is for everyone, and we support this belief by making accessibility one of the project’s core principles.
Right now, the main focus is cleaning up the project to make the port to GTK4 smoother. In addition to ensuring there are fast paths for efficient rendering, moving existing users, and incorporating user requirements, this will make it easier for future contributors to find new pathways to get involved.
In order to accomplish this, we could use funds in a number of ways:
paying for developer time;
hiring an intern to work on WebKitGTK;
supporting hackfests; or
purchasing equipment necessary for development.
We’re asking you to help us grow the WebKitGTK project. It’s a necessary step in the development of GTK4. WebKitGTK will help build a free web by helping more people create the tools they and others need. So please, donate today and vote for WebKitGTK.
The first half of 2020 has been full of growth for GNOME. Caroline Henriksen and Melissa Wu joined the Foundation team; we launched the Community Engagement Challenge; and we expanded our technical infrastructure to include three new servers. As a community and project, we continue to grow, including the GNOME 3.36 release and the University Outreach initiative launch.
As a Foundation, we consider ourselves stewards of the GNOME Project – we look after the community’s wants and needs, we drive forward the efforts no one else can take on, and we make the things that need to happen happen.
As stewards, we are most concerned with the needs of the community. What do the GNOMEies want us to focus on? What will make the experience of our users better?
We’re asking you to vote with your donations. When you donate to the GNOME Foundation during May, you’ll be asked whether we should give extra focus to building GNOME community in Africa or WebKitGTK for GTK4?
Your donations will help GNOME grow in the directions we need to in order to meet the needs of contributors and users everywhere.
Building GNOME Community in Africa
While we have long had GNOMEies in Africa, the communities there have recently been concentrating their efforts. There are multiple events and projects in the works, including the Pan African GNOME Summit.
GNOME is a global project with a global community and a goal to build elegant, efficient, easy to use software for users of every ability and geography. We cannot satisfy that goal without having enthusiastic voices from people of every ability and geography.
WebKitGTK for GTK4
GTK is used to create interfaces and UI elements. It is an integral part of the GNOME ecosystem, used by many both inside and outside the GNOME Project. With considerable effort by GTK core developer and Foundation employee Emmanuele Bassi, GTK4 is well underway. An important step in the development of GTK4 is WebKitGTK.
WebKitGTK creates better web experiences. With web content rendering, process separation, accessibility, audio, and video support, and 3D CSS and accelerated rendering, WebKitGTK is a robust project bringing functionality to desktop computers, laptops, televisions, and mobile devices.
GNOME is a worlwide community that creates a desktop environment, applications, and the underlying technology. GNOME has a long history of design-oriented development, and of working on all parts of the stack to create a good user experience. The GNOME documentation team has worked on both user and developer documentation for over two decades, and was one of the pioneers in creating modular, topic-oriented help.
The GNOME community is loosely organized, with different people teams working on different parts of the project. We strongly value all kinds of contributions, including design, documentation, translations, and outreach. GNOME is more than code.
GNOME has a long history of working with mentoring and outreach programs, including the GNOME Newcomers initiative, Google Summer of Code, and Outreachy (which was incubated in GNOME as the Outreach Program for Women).
Communicate with the entire community on the GNOME Discourse.
Information for technical writers
Before you begin, we encourage you to reach out to the team and introduce yourself. We strive to be a welcoming community, but we also value seeing initiative from contributors. You will work with a number of technologies and systems. Some might be familiar to you. Some might not. If you would like to start learning on your own first, that’s great, but we are prepared to teach you what you need to know. Here’s a (probably incomplete) list of what you might learn, depending on project:
Mallard, a modular, topic-oriented documentation language and framework.
The git version control system. git can be intimidating, but it is used by most open source projects these days, and it enables some powerful workflows.
The merge request workflow on GitLab, similar to the pull request workflow on GitHub.
In addition to your project, we would appreciate if you keep a log of things you find difficult when learning to contribute. This will help us improve the onboarding process in the future.
Project ideas
Below are three ideas for projects.
1. GTK documentation
Summary: Review and update the structure and content of the GTK API reference.
Description: The GTK API reference is made of two parts: one is the description of each function and type in the API; the other is more “narrative”, and contains a general description of each class; overview of complex, interdependent classes (e.g. GtkTreeView, GtkTreeModel, GtkCellArea; or GtkTextView and GtkTextBuffer); a short tutorial on how to write an application using GTK. This second part is the one in need of review and update. The tone and structure of the documentation should be consolidated, and made more appropriate for newcomers to the library.
Technical details: the API reference is generated via gtk-doc from the C sources and from XML files in the GTK repository; this project requires using Linux and being comfortable with building projects written in C.
Summary: Review and update the content of the GObject tutorial and overview
Description: The GLib object type system documentation contains an overview of the type system and of the base object class, with topics ranging from the lifetime of an object instance, to how to install properties; from interfaces to best practices on how to write object types; and a tutorial, which covers similar topics in a more narrative way. Ideally, we should only have a tutorial covering all topics, and have specialised, in-depth documentation for the more complex aspects of the API. The base concepts section should be merged with the tutorial section by having the former section use examples and a more narrative voice from the latter.
Review all of topics in gnome-help (part of the gnome-user-docs documentation module). Identify information that is out of date or misleading. Review recent changes to GNOME to find areas where gnome-help is missing information. After the audit and gap analysis, there should be time for significant writing, but we don’t expect the technical writer to close all issues identified.
Revisit which information is presented to readers of gnome-help, and how it is presented. Identify what information people need the most and formulate a content strategy.
