Press Release – Page 10 – GNOME Foundation

KDE e.V. and the GNOME Foundation to co-host flagship conferences

The boards of KDE e.V. and the GNOME Foundation have issued a call to co-host Akademy and GUADEC, the flagship conferences of the KDE and GNOME projects respectively, during the Summer of 2009.

This would be the first time that the conferences are to be co-hosted. The combined conference is expected to have around 800 attendees, being one of the biggest meetings of free software developers in the world. The content of the conferences will be organized independently, with a number of co-ordinated cross-over sessions with appeal to all attendees.

Cornelius Schumacher, director of KDE e.V., called the move to co-host the conferences momentous. “This represents collaboration between the two communities which some believed could never happen,” he said. “Members of our communities have long worked together through projects on freedesktop.org, or the Linux Architects initiative, but this could be the first time to bring large parts of our respective communities to the same place.”

Behdad Esfahbod of the GNOME Foundation added, “We have much more in common than we have differences. We share a love for the freedom which we give to our users through our software, and for the sense of community which binds us.”

“The big winner in the co-hosted conferences will be free software on the desktop. Getting the developers in the same place can only lead to increased collaboration, and even more high-quality software for our users”, he continued.

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, applauded the move. “Having GUADEC and Akademy at the same venue is good news for the Linux desktop. I suspect we will see great things come out of this meeting.”

Keith Packard, from Freedesktop.org and the X.org Foundation, is looking forward to the joint event. “KDE and GNOME have worked together for years building great software. An integrated conference together will further enhance collaboration and strengthen the broader free software desktop community.”

Both organizations have noted, however, that proposals to host the conferences independently are invited as well. The decision about the events will be made in collaboration of the KDE e.V. and the GNOME Foundation based on the suitability of the available proposals.

Proposals should be made to the KDE e.V. and GNOME Foundation boards no later than June 15th 2008. The call for hosts for Akademy 2009 is available at the KDE e.V. web site and the call for hosts for GUADEC 2009 is available at the GNOME web site.

For further information, or for media enquiries, please contact board@gnome.org and kde-ev-board@kde.org.

About KDE and the KDE e.V.

KDE is an international technology team that creates free and open source software for desktop and portable computing. Among KDE’s products are a modern desktop system for Linux and UNIX platforms, comprehensive office productivity and groupware suites and hundreds of software titles in many categories including Internet and web applications, multimedia, entertainment, educational, graphics and software development. KDE software is translated into more than 60 languages and is built with ease of use and modern accessibility principles in mind. KDE4’s full-featured applications run natively on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X.

KDE e.V. is the organization that supports the growth of the KDE community. Its mission statement — to promote and distribute Free Desktop software — is provided through legal, financial and organizational support for the KDE community. KDE e.V. organises the yearly KDE World Summit “Akademy”, along with numerous smaller-scale development meetings.

More information about KDE and the KDE e.V. can be found at www.kde.org and ev.kde.org.

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

GNOME is a free-software project whose goal is to develop a complete, accessible and easy to use desktop for Linux and Unix-based operating systems. GNOME also includes a complete development environment to create new applications. It is released twice a year on a regular schedule.

The GNOME desktop is used by millions of people around the world. GNOME is a standard part of all leading GNU/Linux and Unix distributions, and is popular with both large existing corporate deployments and millions of small business and home users worldwide.

Comprised of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies, the GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME. The Foundation is a member directed, non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to the GNOME project and helps determine its vision and roadmap.

More information about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be found at www.gnome.org andfoundation.gnome.org.

This announcement is also available on the KDE e.V. website.

3rd GNOME Mobile Summit to be held in Austin

BOSTON, Mass — April 06, 2008 — The 3rd GNOME Mobile Summit being held as part of the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Austin from the 8th to the 10th of April will be a forum where industry and community merge into one, enabling effective collaboration on adapting the GNOME platform to the needs of mobile computing.

The GNOME Mobile Initiative, which first met at GUADEC, the GNOME Users’ and Developers’ European Conference in 2006 and publicly launched in April 2007, is a community effort to ensure that free and open source software is optimized for the growing Linux-based mobile device space. The Initiative has already had several meetings, both formally and informally, and garnered considerable community and industry support.

Dave Neary, the co-ordinator of the GNOME Mobile track at the summit, believes that this meeting will accelerate the adoption of the GNOME platform on mobile devices. “Members of the GNOME Mobile group have been realising the leverage that collaborating closely with a free software community can give. Improved time to market, reduced R&D and maintenance costs, and above all, a highly performant and capable application platform on which to build your applications.”

Up to this point, the focus has been on co-ordinating integration efforts and reducing the amount of code being maintained outside the project, but that focus is expected to change as the initiative continues to mature and grow.

Ross Burton of OpenedHand, recently appointed release manager of the initiative, outlines his plans for the future of the project: “We are now moving beyond the initial phase of co-operation which consisted in people centralising work which they had been doing inside their companies to the core products. The next step is a roadmap which will systematically address the needs of consumers of the GNOME Mobile platform and ensure that the work is done in the community, and the creation of a mobile-specific release set of GNOME and GNOME-related projects.”

GNOME Mobile has a growing number of members, including industry heavyweights such as Nokia, ACCESS and FIC, the support of mobile consortia LiPS, the Linux Foundation’s MLI and Moblin, and a growing number of independent developers and community projects.

“The GNOME Mobile Initiative is at the heart of almost every important open source mobile effort going on in the industry today. The mainstream free software technologies such as GTK+, Gstreamer, matchbox and many other vibrant community-based projects are the linchpins of efforts like the ACCESS Linux Platform, Nokia’s Maemo platform, and the LiMo Foundation Platform. GNOME Mobile is the leading edge of development for the most exciting device space in decades, the rapidly growing world of open source-based mobile devices,” said David “Lefty” Schlesinger, Director of Open Source Technologies for ACCESS Co., Ltd., and a member of the LiMo Foundation Architectural Council.

For more information, and for press enquiries, please contact gnome-press-contact@gnome.org

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

More information about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be found at www.gnome.org andfoundation.gnome.org.

GNOME Foundation and Mozilla Foundation join forces

BOSTON, Mass — March 04, 2008 — The GNOME Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation announced today that they will increase their collaboration to improve developer support and user experience of desktop applications on GNU/Linux and other free software systems.

The partnership has three aspects:

The Mozilla Foundation will join the GNOME Foundation advisory board, helping set the long-term direction of the project.
Mozilla reaffirms its commitment to integrating with the GNOME platform for the XUL development platform, and for Mozilla Firefox.
The Mozilla Foundation announces a grant of $10,000 to the GNOME Foundation, to be spent on the improvement of the accessibility of the GNOME desktop environment via the “GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility” program.

“GNOME and GTK+ have been our environment of choice for years. As we move from desktops into the mobile market, we will continue to work with GNOME to ensure that Mozilla and Firefox users on GNOME platforms will have the best experience possible”, according to Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard.

“Mozilla and GNOME people have been collaborating for nearly a decade. Together we’ve been able to make contributions to the foundation of each other’s platform – from GTK+ to Cairo to browser desktop integration”, says GNOME Foundation Director Vincent Untz. “But the real story is about two organizations sharing many common values including our shared commitment to innovation and bringing freedom to our user base.”

Both projects actively support open standards and formats. Mozilla contributes to the W3C HTML5 working group and WHATWG working group, in order to ensure an open web platform for all future Internet users. GNOME is a member of the ODF Alliance and works with other desktop projects under the freedesktop.org umbrella to offer the best user experience to desktop users. These involvements aim to create space for innovation and to give freedom to the user.

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

More information about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be found at www.gnome.org andfoundation.gnome.org.

About Mozilla Foundation

Established in July 2003, the Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization whose mission is to promote choice and innovation on the Internet through the Mozilla project. Mozilla is a global community dedicated to building free, open source products and technologies that improve the online experience for people everywhere. We work in the open with a highly disciplined, transparent and cooperative development process. The Mozilla Corporation organizes the development and marketing of Mozilla products as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. The Mozilla Foundation is based in Mountain View, California. Learn more about the Mozilla Foundation atwww.mozilla.org/foundation.

GUADEC 2008 to be held in Istanbul, Turkey

BOSTON, Mass—February 28, 2008—GUADEC, the annual GNOME conference will be held in Istanbul, Turkey from the 7th to the 12th of July 2008. The conference will bring together the GNOME development and user community and key personalities from businesses and governments, to discuss the future direction of the GNOME project.

Now in its 9th year, the conference has grown every year from its humble beginnings to become a fixture in the calendar of the leading lights of the Free Software desktop development community, and an important meeting place between industry and community. This year, over 500 people are expected to gather in Turkey for the conference, whose theme will be Designing the User Interface for Freedom.

“The GNOME Project does not stand on its feet by only its technical merits but also with its communal entity. Thousands of people from different cultures improve it every day.” said Barış Çiçek, the lead organizer of GUADEC this year, “Nowhere in the world would be able summarize this but Istanbul, which has been the melting pot of cultures for centuries.”

Among the keynote speakers who will be present at the conference are Matt Webb, co-author of Mind Hacks and a leading user experience designer, Eric Sink, a renowned blogger and software development business entrepreneur, and Leisa Reichelt, a London-based expert in interaction design and user experience research.

The call for participation in the conference is now open, and will close on March 30th. A variety of presentations and sessions can be proposed. “Emerging GNOME trends set the dialog at GUADEC. It was Online Desktop last year, and GNOME Mobile the year before that.” said the program chair, Behdad Esfahbod, “We are excited to see what the community brings to GUADEC this year.”

As with last year, the conference will have three tracks:

Catwalk: Showcasing the best and most exciting applications that the GNOME community has to offer
Topaz: Identifying the diamonds in the rough that will form the basis for the next generation of the free software desktop
Tangle: Community and governance issues, and tough technical issues, will be considered, attacked and resolved

See the GUADEC website for more more information about the conference, to register, and to submit proposals.

GUADEC website: http://www.guadec.org/
Call for presentations: http://guadec.org/guadec08/public/cfp/1
Keynote speakers: http://guadec.org/public/content/keynotes

GNOME Foundation Announces Program to Sponsor Accessibility Projects

BOSTON, Mass—February 27, 2008 — The GNOME Foundation is running an accessibility outreach program, offering US$50,000 to be split among individuals. This program will promote software accessibility awareness among the GNOME and broader Free Software communities, as well as harden and improve the overall quality of the GNOME accessibility offering.

The program is sponsored by GNOME Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Google™’s Open Source Program Office, Canonical, and Novell. This is the second in a series of outreach programs coordinated and run by the GNOME Foundation.

“I’m excited about the GNOME accessibility outreach program because it continues the promotion of compelling accessible design as part of the mainstream developer culture. We believe the set of tangible and achievable tasks outlined will help improve the already good accessibility offering of the GNOME desktop,” said Willie Walker, Senior Staff Engineer of Sun Microsystems, Inc.

GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility starts accepting applications on March 1st and will run towards the end of the year. There will be two tracks to the program: In the first track accepted individuals will work towards accomplishing one of the major projects nominated for the program, earning US$6,000 and can take up to six months to complete the task. The second track will reward contributors US$1,000 for fixing five bugs out of a pool of accessibility bugs nominated by the program judges.

“Novell is committed to both GNOME and to providing the best possible accessibility options to users of our SUSE Linux Enterprise offerings,” said Justin Steinman, director of Linux marketing for Novell. “Through working with the GNOME foundation and other partners, Novell is providing better computer access to all users as they work and interact in today’s increasingly digital world.”

Behdad Esfahbod, member of the GNOME Foundation board of directors and an administrator of the program explains: “Accessibility (or a11y as we write it) is one of the key features of GNOME, like internationalization and usability. GNOME technology works hard to make applications built on top of it be accessible without any extra effort on the application developer’s side. There are shortcomings, however, and this program will help people identify and fix them.”

Individuals interested in participating in the program should check outprojects.gnome.org/outreach/a11y. More information about the program may be found at the same location.

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

More information about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be found at www.gnome.org andfoundation.gnome.org.

About Mozilla Foundation

About Canonical Ltd and Ubuntu

Canonical Ltd, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, is a global organisation headquartered in Europe committed to the development, distribution and support of open source software products and communities. World-class 24×7 commercial support for Ubuntu is available through Canonical’s global support team and partners. Since its launch in October 2004 Ubuntu has become one of the most highly regarded Linux distributions with millions of users around the world. Ubuntu will always be free to download, free to use and free to distribute to others. With these goals in mind, Ubuntu aims to be the most widely used Linux system, and is the centre of a global open source software ecosystem. For more information visit www.canonical.com/ or www.ubuntu.com/.

Press Inquiries

Check People & Contact in the program page to contact the program administrators or judges.

Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. Google is a trademark of Google, Inc. All other names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

GNOME Foundation Statement on ECMA TC45-M Participation

Recently, a number of articles have raised concern in various communities about the GNOME Foundation’s membership of ECMA and participation in TC45-M — the technical committee reviewing Microsoft Office Open XML, or “OOXML”.

In this statement we describe our participation in ECMA TC45-M, and provide a summary of our position on ODF, OOXML and related issues.

Background

Jody Goldberg is the lead maintainer of Gnumeric, a GNOME-based spreadsheet application, a position he has held for seven years.

Before June 2007, he worked for Novell, representing them on TC45-M in order to obtain further documentation of OOXML during its review process. In June, Jody left Novell and proposed that the GNOME Foundation facilitate his work with TC45-M by joining ECMA as a non-profit.

We accepted Jody’s proposal to make sure that OOXML was documented enough such that FLOSS implementations were possible without a huge amount of pain (as experienced by those working on DOC and XLS binary format support). The decision to participate in TC45-M was made by the Board as a direct result of Jody’s request. It did not involve any third party influence or financial considerations at any point.

Jody’s last interaction with TC45-M was in July, to deal with the latest set of issues he submitted regarding charting and pivot tables. While he is not participating in the current activities of TC45-M (which is focused on issue resolution for the ISO standardisation process), our membership continues so he can participate in the next review period.

During his participation in TC45-M (via Novell and the GNOME Foundation), Jody has raised hundreds of issues with the documentation of the format, which will demonstrate a significant, material, on-going benefit to FLOSS implementations of OOXML and as a result, to users of FLOSS products that require such interoperability.

In 2000, the GNOME community de-emphasised its own office software products, choosing to support the nascent OpenOffice.org project. As a result, there are no office products released on our six-month time-based release schedule today, although we encourage and support projects such as AbiWord, Glom and Gnumeric.

Position

GNOME’s principal mission is to deliver Software Freedom to users around the world. The GNOME Foundation aims to support the world-wide developer and contributor base of the GNOME project towards this goal.
The GNOME Foundation is a member of the ODF Alliance, and along with our contributors in the GNOME community, we are passionate supporters of open standards in general. We believe that ODF delivers the best opportunity for industry and government to collaborate on an open document standard, to drive unprecedented innovation, productivity and public transparency.
The GNOME Foundation’s support for Jody’s participation in TC45-M does not indicate endorsement for, or contribution to, ISO standardisation of the Microsoft Office Open XML formats.
While Microsoft should be applauded for releasing information about the Office document formats, their manoeuvres around the standards process demonstrate that they are not pursuing standardisation as a platform for innovation for the entire industry. Indeed, Microsoft continues to behave in the abusive manner of an unreformed, convicted monopolist with no passion for true industry collaboration in the interests of users.
We are deeply concerned that abuse of the standards process is eroding public trust in the value and independence of international standards. Both ODF and OOXML are very heavily influenced by their implementation heritage, neither are likely to deliver the “one true office format”, and both communities have — in their own way — played a role in this erosion of trust.We in the Open Source and Free Software community should be cautious about taking a black and white approach to a process that is rapidly turning standards into industrial weapons to the detriment of our users, software and communities. We face the very real danger that standards will suffer the same fate as patents: created to spur innovation and sharing, but manipulated to control and restrain.

Get Involved

The GNOME Foundation is supporting the pursuit of Software Freedom through the innovative, accessible, and beautiful user experience created by GNOME contributors around the world. It’s a fun and inviting community, so if you’re reading this and wondering what you can do to help promote Software Freedom, contributing to GNOME is a great way to start!

Media Enquiries

GNOME Foundation Press Officer
Jeff Waugh (Sydney, Australia)
Email: gnome-press-contact@gnome.org
Phone: +61 2 9318 0284
Mobile: +61 423 989 818

GNOME Community Celebrates 10 Years of Software Freedom, Innovation and Industry Adoption

Boston MA, USA — August 15, 2007 — A one month, world-wide celebration of GNOME’s tenth anniversary begins this week, culminating in mid-September with Software Freedom Day and the release of GNOME 2.20. During the celebration month, GNOME contributors will create a scrapbook wiki recording their ten year history, and a commemorative cookery book with “Open Source” recipes contributed by GNOME community members from around the world.

History and Achievements

Since 1997, the GNOME project has grown from a handful of developers to a contributor base of coders, documentors, translators, interface designers, accessibility specialists, artists and testers numbering in the thousands.

As the leading user experience platform for Open Source and Free Software operating systems, GNOME has received massive commercial adoption and support among distributors such as Novell, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems and Ubuntu, and software vendors targeting those platforms such as Eclipse, Google, Mozilla and VMWare.

In early 2007, the project launched the GNOME Mobile initiative, reflecting growing interest in the GNOME platform for mobile and embedded systems such as the OLPC XO, Nokia N800, OpenMoko Neo1973, the ACCESS Linux Platform and numerous single-purpose mobile and embedded devices.

With such an immense community of individual and corporate contributors, GNOME has become the driving force of Open Source and Free Software user experience innovation, internationalisation, usability and accessibility, bringing the benefits of Open Source and Free Software to users around the world.

Words from our Founders

“In the last 10 years the GNOME community has not only reached our goal of creating a superb desktop, the applications and developer tools that go with it: Our software is now a core component of every Free Software operating system available, and we are growing into increasingly important areas such as mobile and embedded devices”, said Miguel de Icaza, founder of the GNOME Project. “The GNOME community continues to thrive, innovate and come up with new ideas to improve the Free Software user experience for everyone. I hope that the next ten years will be as fun and fascinating as the first.”

In August 1997, Miguel de Icaza founded the “GNOME Desktop project” as a “free and complete set of user friendly applications and desktop tools […] based entirely on free software.”

“Ten years ago, using only Free Software, you could not do graphic design and illustration, you could not balance your checkbook, you could not download pictures from your camera to the computer, you could not do phone calls over the Internet, you could not create a spreadsheet with pie charts, and you could not plug a printer or hard drive into your computer and expect it to just work”, recalled Federico Mena Quintero, an active GNOME developer throughout its ten year history. “Today, I am happy to say that we have reached and greatly exceeded GNOME’s original goal. Thank you to all the contributors who made the GNOME vision a reality. You have given us freedom, good jobs — and a priceless group of friends.”

Last month, during GNOME’s annual user and developer conference (GUADEC), Federico Mena Quintero was the recipient of the GNOME Thank You Pants, an annual award for Outstanding Service to the GNOME community. The audience gave him a five minute standing ovation.

Words from our Advisory Board Partners

“The foundation for much of the ACCESS(tm) Linux Platform is open source GNOME technology. ACCESS is proud to be a member of the GNOME Foundation’s Advisory Board, a founding member of the GNOME Mobile Initiative, and a sponsor of GUADEC. The GNOME technologies have been enabling innovation for an entire decade, and have become increasingly important in the mobile device space. We’re looking forward to the next ten years! Happy birthday, GNOME!” — David ‘Lefty’ Schlesinger, Director of Open Source Technologies, ACCESS
“10 years of GNOME is some achievement. Everyone in the free software movement owes a huge debt of gratitude to you guys and your work, as does every user of your desktop. So big love from Ubuntu and here’s to next 10.” — Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, Canonical
“Debian has been delivering GNOME releases since the very early versions, and is proud to have seen the GNOME project grow and mature over the past 10 years. Being a key component of our Operating System, we look forward to continuing to make GNOME innovations available to our users. Happy birthday!” — Jordi Mallach,Debian
“As a founding member of the GNOME Foundation’s Advisory Board, IBM congratulates the GNOME Project on their ten year anniversary. The GNOME community should be proud of their open source innovations and efforts to improve the free desktop user experience. The usability and accessibility of GNOME enabling technologies has lead IBM to deliver Eclipse based products that leverage GNOME components.” — John Walicki, Open Client Architect, IBM
“Imendio would not have existed if it were not for GNOME and many of our developers have been here since the beginning. We are happy to have the opportunity to join these celebrations and would like to extend our congratulations to the entire project from all of us at Imendio!” — Mikael Hallendal, CEO and co-founder,Imendio AB
“GNOME has demonstrated over the last ten years the power of free software, delivering a desktop that all people around the world can use. Novell is proud to be able to contribute to its continued success.” — Ron Hovsepian, President and CEO, Novell
“We’d like to congratulate everyone involved with the GNOME project, both past and present, on the amazing achievements and progress the project has made over it’s first 10 years. We are honoured to have played a part in taking GNOME beyond the desktop and bringing the GNOME experience to new devices and users. We’re very proud to be contributors to GNOME project, a member of the GNOME Foundation’s Advisory Board, a founding member of the GNOME Mobile Initiative, and a sponsor of GUADEC. Here’s to the next 10 years!” — Matthew Allum, CEO, OpenedHand
“Red Hat is proud to have been a staunch supporter of, and major contributor to, the GNOME project for longer than any other company. We congratulate the team on reaching this milestone. The maturation of the GNOME project, with so many advances over the past decade, is testament to the innovative work that will make Linux on the desktop a reality for many around the world in the coming years. Red Hat’s commitment to the GNOME project remains as strong as ever.” — Gerry Riveros, Product Marketing Manager, Red Hat
“Sun Microsystems congratulates the GNOME Foundation on ten great years. In particular, Sun and the community members involvement in the accessibility features of GNOME has been key to GNOME’s ability to be used for the Solaris(TM) Operating System and has been a key enabler to its use in other commercial settings. We look forward to participating in the GNOME community for a fruitful, accessible and Free tomorrow.” — Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer, Sun Microsystems

About the GNOME Foundation

Media Enquiries

GNOME Foundation Press Officer
Jeff Waugh (Sydney, Australia. UTC+10.)
Email: gnome-press-contact@gnome.org
Mobile: +61 423 989 818

Free software engineering company Igalia announces today that it has joined GNOME Foundation’s advisory board.

The GNOME Foundation advisory board is a vehicle for free software-friendly organizations and companies to communicate with the board of directors and help the directors guide the overall direction of GNOME. Based in Spain, Igalia is a company which has been using GNOME technologies and contributing back by getting involved within the community.

“GNOME has been always our main development technology; we first used it for creating a free development framework called Fisterra, and have been progressively increasing our involvement in the project and its strong community since then, contributing with code, documentation, and supporting different GNOME events and initiatives”, said Juan José Sánchez Penas, co-founder of Igalia, who will sit on the board as Igalia’s representative, “We are very pleased to become part of the advisory board, and will try to contribute as much as possible with ideas, work and enthusiasm, always keeping in mind the goal we share with the rest of the community members: making GNOME even better.”

“Igalia has succeeded in identifying a weak point in the GNOME infrastructure – automation of GNOME build and testing – and has pushed the effort from inside the community to fix this problem”, added Vincent Untz, director of the GNOME Foundation and member of the GNOME release team. “Joining the advisory board was the next logical step for a company supporting GNOME and involved in its community, and we are excited to welcome Igalia as an advisory board member. The presence of Igalia and other GNOME-friendly industry leaders, companies and organizations on the advisory board is a tribute to the excellent work of GNOME contributors who produce a top-notch free software desktop environment.”

“This is an important step for Igalia because it consolidates our commitment with GNOME. We have been working with the project for years and now we would like to collaborate with this part of the community”, said Alejandro García Castro, co-founder of Igalia, who will also sit on the board as representative, “Igalia’s goal is to help have a strong community that could get as much collaboration and people around the technology as possible. GNOME is one of the key technologies in the free software world and supporting it as a member of the advisory board is another way to help the free software community.”

About Igalia

Igalia is a company from the south-western Europe (Galicia, Spain), specialized in development of innovative free software technologies and solutions.

Igalia has been increasing its involvement in the GNOME community since its foundation more than five years ago, contributing with code and documentation to various components and applications, and sponsoring and organizing different GNOME events, including international conferences.

In May 2003, the Fisterra project, a framework for developing business applications using GNOME, was published by Igalia. The company has also helped public administrations to increase use of free software and GNOME, and developed or evolved different pieces of software that were required to allow this adoption.

During the last two years, Igalia has applied all its previous experience on free software, Fisterra, and GNOME to the mobile market, performing several projects for relevant international companies.

More information about Igalia can be found at: www.igalia.com.

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

GNOME is a free-software project whose goal is to develop a complete, and easy to use desktop for Linux and Unix-based operating systems. GNOME also includes a complete development environment to create new applications. It is released twice a year on a regular schedule.

The GNOME desktop is used by millions of people around the world. GNOME is a standard part of all leading Linux and Unix distributions, and is popular with both large existing corporate deployments and millions of small business and home users worldwide.

More information about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be found at www.gnome.org and foundation.gnome.org.

Contacts for the media

Igalia S.L.
Juan José Sánchez Penas (A Coruña, Galicia, Spain)
Email: info@igalia.com
Phone: +34 981913991

GNOME Foundation Press Officer
Jeff Waugh (Sydney, Australia)
Email: gnome-press-contact@gnome.org
Mobile: +61 423 989 818

The GNOME Foundation and Industry Leaders Join to Create GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative

Developers and Corporations Unite to Advance GNOME Technology as Leading User Experience Platform for Mobile and Embedded Devices.

Embedded Linux Conference, Santa Clara, USA — April 19, 2007 — The GNOME Foundation announced today the creation of the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative (GMAE), and a software platform for user experience development across a wide range of device profiles.

“GNOME continues to drive the cutting edge of Open Source and Free Software innovation. With the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative, GNOME expands the reach of Software Freedom to new devices, new markets, and new audiences”, said Jeff Waugh, founder of the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative and a director of the GNOME Foundation board. “Developers will not only have the means to create great mobile and embedded software, but the freedom to envision and create fundamentally new kinds of devices, for entirely new markets.”

Mobile, embedded and converged devices comprise one of the most rapidly growing segments of the technology landscape, accounting for sales of billions of units per year. Analysts estimate that by 2010, one out of two smartphones will be based on Free and Open source software, and growth in this space is already faster than that of proprietary devices (Canalys, 2006). The mobile and embedded device space represents an unprecedented opportunity for third-party developers.

Mission

The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative will advance the use, development and commercialization of GNOME components as a mobile and embedded user experience platform. It brings together industry leaders, expert consultants, key developers and the community and industry organizations they represent. The initiative aims to:

Increase community and commercial visibility of GMAE technology and participating organizations.
Coordinate investment in the GTK+ and GNOME platform, documentation and developer tools.
Increase development focus on the “mobile experience”, particularly the integration of GNOME desktop and GMAE technology.
Facilitate healthy development collaboration between participating organizations, the GNOME community and related projects; and between GNOME platform, desktop and GMAE developers.
Pursue standardization opportunities for the platform, and potentially at the user experience level.
Ensure that Software Freedom is a reality beyond the desktop, and available in the hands of users around the world.

Participants

“This initiative augments a thriving commercial and community ecosystem around GNOME for mobile and embedded applications”, noted Bill Weinberg, Principal Analyst at LinuxPundit. “Building on freely-licensed GTK+, GStreamer, and other GNOME software, the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative provides a level playing field for companies and developers, for products and projects, offering a platform for innovation and collaboration.”

Founding organizations announcing their participation today include GNOME Foundation supporters ACCESS, Canonical, Debian, Igalia, Imendio, Intel, Nokia, OLPC, OpenedHand and Red Hat, and GMAE contributors CodeThink, Collabora, FIC, Fluendo, Kernel Concepts, Movial, Nomovok, Openismus, Vernier, Waugh Partners and Wolfson Microelectronics.

Bridging industry and community, the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative involves Open Source projects such as Avahi, BlueZ, Cairo, GNOME, GPE, GStreamer, GTK+, Hildon, Maemo, Matchbox, OpenMoko, Telepathy and Tinymail; and industry organisations CELF, the Linux Foundation and LiPS.

A number of additional participants will announce their involvement at a later date, due to product schedules and other disclosure issues.

Platform

The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Platform is a subset of the proven, widely used GNOME Platform. In addition to the core user experience toolkit (GTK+), the platform includes crucial functionality such as multimedia support (GStreamer), instant messaging and presence (Telepathy), Bluetooth (BlueZ), contacts and calendaring (E-D-S), and network service discovery (Avahi). APIs are available for developers using C, C++ or Python.

Following GNOME’s highly successful licensing strategy, the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Platform is distributed under the terms of the LGPL, which allows for royalty-free use in proprietary software products, but encourages contribution of platform code changes back to the community. This, combined with a thriving open development process supported by industry and community, makes the GMAE Platform uniquely suited to the needs of mobile and embedded developers.

The platform definition announced today represents components that are currently shipping in production devices, but GMAE participants are planning to grow the platform aggressively in the next twelve months, to enable new technologies and functionality. Components already under consideration include the Java Mobile & Embedded platform (Java ME), a geolocation service (GeoClue), a hardware information system (HAL), an audio management service (PulseAudio), and a mobile email framework (Tinymail).

The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Platform is already a key technology component in a wide range of products and projects, including those from GMAE participants such as the Intel Mobile Internet Device (MID), the Nokia N770 and N800 web tablet, the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop, the OpenMoko Neo1973 mobile phone, the Vernier LabQuest; the Sugar, Hildon and GPE user interfaces; and the ACCESS Linux Platform.

As an open development community, GMAE participants are keen to hear from other organisations and developers using these technologies. Please introduce yourself to the community on our development mailing list, or contact Jeff Waugh for more information (details below).

Industry & Community Support

The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative enjoys strong support from industry and community leaders:

“As Linux becomes increasingly important in the portable Internet device and mobile segments, the GNOME Mobile & Embedded initiative is imperative for the community to collaborate on building a strong experience for mobile device users. We look forward to contributing and participating in the initiative to advance Embedded Linux.” — Imad Sousou, Director of Open Source Technology Center, Intel
“GNOME is an active and truly open developer community creating innovative software. This is why Nokia joined the community and chose GNOME software as a foundation for the Maemo platform and our Internet Tablets. We are excited about the growing use of GNOME software in consumer devices. The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative will now take this further by bringing together community and industry to promote and coordinate the continued development of the GMAE platform.” — Ari Jaaksi, Director of Open Source Software Operations,Nokia
“With OpenedHand’s core business over the past five years being focused on the development and improvement of GNOME based embedded devices, we are extremely pleased to be part of the formation of the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative. These technologies give device manufacturers unrivaled freedom and flexibility in device creation. GMAE further paves the way for collaboration between companies and the community to further innovations and benefit all involved.” — Matthew Allum, CEO, OpenedHand Ltd.
“As one of the oldest corporate contributors to the GNOME Project, Red Hat is excited to see GNOME move into new spaces beyond the desktop. We’ve seen the flexibility of the platform with the new UI we’ve created for the One Laptop per Child project, which is based on the blending of technologies that both GNOME and Red Hat bring to the table. GNOME will be an incredibly important technology in our drive to build new markets in the client space.” — Brian Stevens, CTO at Red Hat
“With its long term focus on simplified, usable human interfaces, the entrance of the GNOME project onto the mobile and embedded scene is a welcome one. Add in the widespread corporate and community support that the parent project enjoys, and the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative is a project to follow.” — Stephen O’Grady, Principal Analyst, RedMonk

More Information

More information about the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative can be found at www.gnome.org/mobile.

About the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative

The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative advances the use, development and commercialization of GNOME components as a mobile and embedded user experience platform. It brings together industry leaders, expert consultants, key developers and the community and industry organizations they represent. As an open development community, participants support the GNOME Mobile & Embedded Platform, a subset of GNOME’s proven, widely used desktop platform, focusing on software components shipping in production mobile and embedded products. More information about GMAE can be found at www.gnome.org/mobile.

About the GNOME Foundation

Media Enquiries

GNOME Foundation Press Officer
Jeff Waugh (Sydney, Australia. Currently in Santa Clara, CA.)
Email: gnome-press-contact@gnome.org
Mobile: +61 423 989 818

GNOME to Sponsor Female Developers in a Summer Outreach Program

BOSTON, Mass – June 13, 2006 – The GNOME Foundation is offering USD$9000 to female students in order to promote the participation of women in GNOME-related development.

The money originates from GNOME’s participation in the Google “Summer of Code” program (code.google.com/soc/), for which GNOME developers will mentor 20 students working throughout the northern summer on GNOME-related projects. This year GNOME received 181 applications to Google’s program, yet none were from women. The GNOME Foundation has therefore chosen to reinvest Google’s contribution into a new program designed to increase the participation of women in GNOME. The program has no official relationship with Google.

“Free software prides itself on being open to anyone with a good idea, yet less than 2% of free software developers are female. We, as a community, need to be actively working to change this statistic, and programs like this one are a much needed step in the right direction.” said Hanna Wallach, a GNOME developer who is involved in several projects that encourage women to participate in free software development.

The Women’s Summer Outreach Program is currently accepting applications from female students. Accepted students will receive a stipend of USD$3000 over a two month period. A pool of project ideas is provided atprojects.gnome.org/wsop/, though original proposals are also encouraged. Projects may either be related to GNOME directly, or indirectly via projects such as Gstreamer and Abiword. Each student will be assigned a mentor to provide guidance throughout the program.

Vincent Untz, member of the GNOME Foundation board and coordinator of the GNOME team for Google’s “Summer of Code” program, explained: “Many women have the skills required to contribute to Free Software projects like GNOME, but may not see an opportunity to start working with us. By initiating this program, not only do we want to highlight the issue, but we also hope that this opportunity will help more women to get involved in the long term.”

Applications should be submitted using the form at projects.gnome.org/wsop/. More information about the application process may be found at the same location.

About GNOME

GNOME is a free-software project whose goal is to develop a complete, and easy to use desktop for Linux and UNIX-based operating systems. GNOME also includes a complete development environment to create new applications. It is released two times a year on a regular schedule.

The GNOME desktop is used by millions of people around the world. GNOME is a standard part of all leading Linux and Unix distributions worldwide, including popular community distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora Core, and SUSE. It is is also the default desktop on major enterprise Linux distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, and Sun Java Desktop System.

GNOME is also the desktop of choice for some of the world’s biggest Linux desktop deployments, including large government deployments in Extremadura, Spain, and Sao Paulo, Brazil. GNOME’s technology is used by major Linux ISVs such as Firefox, the Eclipse Project, Real Networks, and VMWare. Additionally, GNOME is increasingly being used by mobile device companies such as Nokia and Palm.

More than 500 software developers from every continent, including more than 100 paid developers, contribute their time and effort to the project. Sponsors include industry leaders like Fluendo, HP, IBM, Novell, Red Hat, and Sun. GNOME is supported on a variety of platforms, including GNU/Linux (more commonly referred to as Linux), Solaris Operating Environment, HP-UX, Unix, BSD and Apple’s Darwin. More information on GNOME can be found at www.gnome.org.

About the GNOME Foundation

Press Inquiries

Check www.gnome.org/press/ to find your nearest press contact. You may also contact us at gnome-press-contact@gnome.org.

Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. Google and “Summer of Code” are trademarks of Google, Inc.. All other names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.