Author: GNOME Foundation

Keeping the (server) lights on

The GNOME project is built by a vibrant community and supported by the GNOME Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity registered in California (USA). The GNOME community has spent more than 20 years creating a free desktop environment designed for the user. We‘re asking you to join us by becoming Friend of GNOME.

The GNOME Foundation manages the technical infrastructure powering GNOME projects. Our Infrastructure Team is led by Andrea Veri and also includes Bartłomiej Piotrowski, working in devops and systems engineering. While Andrea has been with the Foundation for some time, Bart was hired in 2019.

Building and maintaining infrastructure for the GNOME project is one of the many activities of the GNOME Foundation, and it’s one of the most important. Building software like the GNOME desktop environment requires a lot of technical support, including managing servers and providing collaboration tools. Since GNOME is focused on being a self-sustaining community, we look as much as possible to managing our own services and software, and making sure it is free and open source.

The GNOME Infrastructure Team currently supports a total of 34 virtual machines hosted on a total of eight bare metal nodes. These virtual machines allow us to run services like the Openshift Container Platform (OSCP), which provides self-service access to the community to run any of their workflows on an automated and containarized fashion.

GNOME is build using self-hosted FOSS. We collaboratively build GNOME using a GitLab instance, which has a total of 15k accounts. We do shared storage using NextCloud. Community discussion is handled over Mailman, Discourse, and MoinMoin. We are currently using Indico and Connfa for our event planning and management.

There are other community-focused services as well, including:

    • internationalization services including localized home pages and translation toolings;
    • mail services for staff and community members;
    • staff mail endpoint for all the GNOME employees and contractors to store their mails on a supported hosting;
    • an IDM solution with more than 2.5k accounts, mirroring infrastructure for the GNOME sources to be available to a place that is closest to where you live for fastest download speeds;
    • Cachet for a dynamically updated Infrastructure Status page; and
    • a Surveys system and several app migrations from virtual machines into containers with a major improvement over maintainability, performance and budget that allowed us to retire unnecessary hypervisors and reduce the costs for the hardware renewals; and
    • a list of tools we offer to the community that keeps increasing year over year.

Additionally, the GNOME builders for the CI/CD processes were fully automated allowing the team to save time putting the system into service whenever a new builder is being donated to the GNOME Foundation.

We have a lot planned for the future. In particular we‘ll be focusing on migrating additional virtual machines into containers on OSCP. The idea is to consolidate and simplify the existing infrastructure even further to reduce maintenance and costs but at the same time offer the community the toolings they need in order for the GNOME Project to be successful as a whole.

We’re asking you to help us to help make the GNOME Project successful becoming a Friend of GNOME. By supporting the Foundation, you’re helping us to provide these necessary resources to the GNOME community, as well as expand our offerings to better meet the growing needs of the Project.

Everything the GNOME Foundation does is for the GNOME community. By supporting us, you’re supporting a global community looking to serve everyone, regardless of geography or language. Join us in working towards a brighter future for GNOME by becoming a Friend of GNOME today.

Photo by The National Archives (UK) is licensed under a CC-BY 3.0 License.

Call for GNOME.Asia 2020 Summit proposals

The GNOME.Asia Committee is inviting interested parties to submit proposals for hosting the GNOME.Asia Summit during the second half of 2020.

GNOME.Asia Summit is the featured annual GNOME Conference in Asia. The event focuses primarily on the GNOME desktop, but also covers applications and the development platform tools. It brings together the GNOME community in Asia to provide a forum for users, contributors, foundation leaders, governments, and businesses to discuss the current technology and future developments.

Over the last twelve years, GNOME.Asia Summit has been held in many cities throughout Asia, including Gresik, Beijing, Ho-Chi-Minh City, Taipei, Bangalore, Hong Kong, Seoul, Beijing, Depok, New Delhi, and Chongqing.

The Committee’s preference is to find a new location each year in order to spread GNOME throughout Asia, and we are looking for local organizers to rise to the challenge of organizing an excellent GNOME event. The GNOME.Asia committee will assist in the process, but there is a definitive need for individuals to be actively involved and committed to the planning and execution of the event.

How to Submit a Proposal:

Interested parties are hereby invited to submit a formal proposal to the GNOME.Asia Committee. The deadline for the proposals is January 17th, 2020. Please email your proposal to gnome-asia-committee-list@gnome.org. 

We might invite you to present your proposal in more details over our regular IRC meetings, or send you additional questions and requests. Results will be announced by the second week of February 2020.

The conference might require availability of facilities for 3-5 days, including a weekend, during the second half of 2020. Final event dates should avoid other key free software conferences or other events that may conflict. 

The key points that should be included in the proposal, and which will be used to decide among candidates, are.

  • Local community support for hosting the conference.
  • Venue details. Information about infrastructure and facilities to hold the conference should be provided.
  • Preliminary schedule with main program & different activities.
  • Information about how Internet connectivity will be managed.
  • Lodging choices ranging from affordable housing to nicer hotels, and information about distances between the venue and lodging options.
  • The availability of restaurants or the organization of catering on-site, cost of food/soft drinks/beer.
  • The availability and cost of travel from major Asian and European cities.
  • Local industries, universities and government support.
  • Please provide a reasonably detailed budget (sponsorships, expenses, etc).
  • Provide plans for local sponsorship.
  • Provide plans to encourage student and youth participation.

Below, we have included resources for people interested in submitting a proposal. Please do not hesitate to contact the GNOME.Asia committee with any questions at gnome-asia-committee-list@gnome org.

 We are looking forward to hearing from you soon!

– GNOME.Asia Committee

Resources for Interested GNOME.Asia 2020 Organizers: 

[1] Wiki about GNOME Asia: http://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeAsia
[2] Check list: https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeAsia/SummitCheckList
[3] HowTo’s: https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeAsia/HowToOrganizeGNOME.Asia%20Summit
[4] GNOME Foundation conference requirements: https://wiki.gnome.org/Foundation/Conferences
[5] Sample winning proposal: http://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeAsia/2012Summit/Bids?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Proposal_of_HongKong_GNOME_Asia_Hackfest_2012_20120124.pdf

Please help us spread the word! If you haven’t already, please follow us on Twitter: @gnome_asia and @gnome, and on Facebook.

Step up and become a Friend of GNOME!

The GNOME project is built by a vibrant community and supported by the GNOME Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity registered in California (USA). The GNOME community has spent more than 20 years creating a desktop environment designed for the user. We‘re asking you to step up for GNOME and become Friend of GNOME. We’re working to have 100 new Friends of GNOME join by January 6, 2020.

This photo includes a large group of people standing on steps outside on a sunny day. In the foreground is a large beach blanket with brightly colored GNOME logos on it.
Photo by Ana Rey licensed under a CC-BY-SA license.

The GNOME Foundation was founded in 2000, to support the activities of the GNOME project and our goal of building a desktop environments that respects the freedom of every user, developer, and contributor. We continue to make great strides towards this.

2019 has been an exciting year for us with the expansion of the Foundation‘s staff and efforts:

This year has not been without challenges. Most notably, October brought with it allegations of patent infringement from Rothschild Patent Imaging, Ltd. Rather than settling or backing down, we are taking this fight as far as we have to in order to say that patent trolls have no place in free software. This effort is something we’ll be carrying forward into the coming year.

Looking ahead to 2020, we already have a lot going on in addition to our patent case. There’s kicking off the GNOME Coding Education Challenge in order to expand the tools we have available to learn and teach. We will be seriously expanding our accessibility efforts, and are currently planning an accessibility audit and making plans for updates to the Orca screen reader. We’ve already started planning GUADEC 2020, which will bring us to our first North American GUADEC in Zacatecas, Mexico. We have a GNOME.Asia in the works. There will be more hackfests and newcomer events, intern and mentorship opportunities, and constant efforts to work on, for, and with the community. We’ll do all of this while upholding the standards of technical excellence you have come to expect from the GNOME project, building software for people of every country with every level of ability.

The GNOME Foundation supports the work of the GNOME community, and we need your help to keep going. We’re working on the future, not just of how you interact with your computer, but the future of free software and we want you to join us. Step up for GNOME! You can become a Friend of GNOME, to support us on either an annual or monthly basis. We ask for a minimum donation of $10/month, and recommend $25 a month ($5 for students). Every donation comes with a Thank You postcard from a GNOME hacker and a discount on GNOME swag when you find our booth at a conference. For $30 a month, you can get a subscription to LWN. If you donate $500 or more on an annual basis, you’ll get a wonderful Thank You note especially from executive director Neil McGovern.

We’re bringing software freedom to the desktop. We‘re developing a safe, secure, accessible desktop environment for everyone; building a global community of contributors; and fostering the next generation of free and open source software contributors. By becoming a Friend of GNOME you are becoming a part of that.

Cheers,

Andrea, Bart, Emmanuele, Kristi, Molly, Neil, and Rosanna

GUADEC 2020 announcement

The GNOME Foundation is excited to announce that GUADEC 2020 will take place between the 22nd – 28th of July in Zacatecas, Mexico.

Zacatecas is a city and municipality in Mexico, located in the north-central part of the country. Set in a valley and surrounded by mountains, the city, which had its start as a Spanish mining camp in the mid-16th century, has a rich interesting history and is a very pleasant city to visit, featuring several interesting attractions.

The foundation is confident that the organizing team will do their best to make GUADEC 2020 a great experience for every party involved.

To stay up-to-date with the latest conference deadlines and registration dates, news, activities and more follow @GUADEC and @GNOME on Twitter.

Whether you wish to present your work, take part in the workshops, or simply attend the talks, the GNOME Foundation hopes to see you in Zacatecas!

File:Zacatecas vistaBufa.jpg
Levimx90 CC-BY 3.0

GNOME acknowledge AWS Sponsorship

The GNOME Foundation wants to recognize AWS for donating credits that have allowed us (GNOME) to taking advantage of the multitude of services Amazon provides. In particular, the GNOME Infrastructure utilizes AWS S3 service as a file store for the multitude of Docker images that are generated or updated daily.

GNOME uses GitLab as its code hosting, issue tracking, and CI/CD solution. One of its most appreciated features is the ability for developers to upload re-usable images used to run builds and host production services. Before making use of S3, the storage assigned to Docker registries was growing unsustainably. The introduction of S3 dramatically lowered down the maintenance burden and costs of running such a service in addition to clearing out outage windows that were needed to keep registries clean and old images pruned, which generally required several minutes of service downtime.

Thanks, AWS!

Linux Application Summit 2019 about to start in Barcelona

The GNOME Foundation is very excited that Linux Application Summit 2019 is about to start in Barcelona, Spain.

Linux App Summit 2019 (or LAS) is a joint collaboration between GNOME and KDE which will feature 3 days of talks from prominent members of the Linux developer community from Tuesday 12th November to Thursday 14th November, and Birds of a Feather sessions on Friday 15th.

Linux App Summit which is primarily is a conference focused on spreading information and encouraging the development of the Linux application ecosystem.

The full schedule and more information about Linux Application Summit including the list of speakers is available at the official website. 

The GNOME Foundation also thanks all of the sponsors and individuals who made the Linux App Summit possible.

CC-BY-2.0 Jorge Láscar

Locations for GUADEC 2020 and 2021 announced!

The GNOME Foundation is excited to announce that GUADEC, the annual GNOME conference, will be held in Zacatecas, Mexico in 2020, and in Riga, Latvia in 2021.

GUADEC brings together hundreds of users and developers every year to further the GNOME Project, and it is one of our longest-standing and most noteworthy events. For the first time, GUADEC is moving outside of Europe. Neil McGovern, the GNOME Executive Director, said “Recognizing our flagship conference as something that should move throughout the world is important. We hope to not only make it easier for people from North, Central, and South America to attend, but to help kick-start local participation in the GNOME project.”

Zacatecas, the capital of the state of the same name, is a city in the Bajío in Mexico. Its historical center has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. As well as its historical location, Zacatecas has high quality conference venues which are supported by the regional government.

Further, we are pleased to announce GUADEC 2021 will be held in Riga, Latvia. Also a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Riga is the financial, creative, and cultural center of Latvia. Not only the capital and the largest city in Latvia, Riga is also the largest city in the Baltic States. The city lies on the Gulf of Riga, at the mouth of the Daugava River.

The GNOME Foundation looks forward to hosting GUADEC 2020 in Zacatecas and GUADEC 2021 in Riga. To stay up-to-date with the latest conference deadlines and registration dates, news, activities, and more, follow @GUADEC and @GNOME on Twitter.

Whether you wish to present your work, take part in the workshops, or simply attend the talks, the GNOME Foundation hopes to see you in Zacatecas and Riga!

“Zacatecas Skyline” by o_sam_o is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 

GNOME files defense against patent troll

Orinda, CA – 2019/10/21

Image from Marco Verch is available under cc-by-2.0.

A month ago, GNOME was hit by a patent troll for developing the Shotwell image management application. It’s the first time a free software project has been targeted in this way, but we worry it won’t be the last. Rothschild Patent Imaging, LLC offered to let us settle for a high five figure amount, for which they would drop the case and give us a licence to carry on developing Shotwell. This would have been simple to do so; it would have caused less work, cost less money, and provided the Foundation a lot less stress. But it also would be wrong.  Agreeing to this would leave this patent live, and allow this to be used as a weapon against countless others. We will stand firm against this baseless attack, not just for GNOME and Shotwell, but for all free and open source software projects.

For these reasons, GNOME Foundation Executive Director Neil McGovern instructed our legal counsel at Shearman & Sterling to file three papers with the court in California.

First: a motion to dismiss the case outright. We don’t believe that this is a valid patent, or that software can or should be able to be patented in this way. We want to make sure that this patent isn’t used against anyone else, ever.

Second: our answer to the claim. We don’t believe that there is a case GNOME needs to answer to. We want to show that the use of Shotwell, and free software in general, isn’t affected by this patent.

Third: our counterclaim. We want to make sure that this isn’t just dropped when Rothschild realizes we’re going to fight this.

We want to send a message to all software patent trolls out there — we will fight your suit, we will win, and we will have your patent invalidated. To do this, we need your help. Please help support the GNOME Foundation in sending a message that patent trolls should never target free software by making a donation to the GNOME Patent Troll Defense Fund. If you can’t, please help spread the word with your friends on social media.

GNOME opens recruitment to support Coding Education Challenge

Orinda, CA.

Today, October 18th 2019, the GNOME Foundation has announced two positions it is recruiting for to help drive the GNOME project and Free Software on the desktop. As previously announced, this is in support of our Coding Education Challenge, as well as the project more generally.

The Foundation is currently recruiting for two posts:

  • Graphic Designer
    • We are looking for an experienced Graphic Designer to help GNOME create visual concepts to communicate ideas that inspire, inform, and captivate our users and partners. You will develop the overall layout and production design for advertisements, brochures, magazines, and corporate reports.
  • Program Coordinator (part time, fixed term)
    • We are looking for an experienced Program Coordinator to undertake a variety of administrative and program management tasks. You will help in planning and organizing programs and activities as well as carry out important operational duties.

The Foundation is keen to hear from any person who is interested in applying for one of these posts. Details on how to apply and the application deadlines can be found on the Foundation’s Positions Available page.

GNOME Shell 2019 Hackfest concludes in Leidschendam Netherlands

The GNOME Shell 2019 Hackfest which took place in Leidschendam, Netherlands have concluded.

During the Hackfest various discussions was held and work was done to improve Wayland integration with GNOME Shell, mixed DPI densities, Xwayland-on-demand, and more!

Thanks go out to the Revspace Hackerspace for the venue. Reports from the Hackfest is available on the wiki . The Hackfest was considered as a great success as much progress on the GNOME the Shell was done.

This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0.