Press Release – Page 7 – GNOME Foundation

GNOME 3 Improved and Refined with the Release of GNOME 3.2

Groton, MA, September 28 2011: Today, the GNOME Desktop project released GNOME 3.2, the first follow-up release to its ground-breaking GNOME 3.0. With GNOME 3, GNOME undertook a major redesign and reimagined the user interface for the next generation of the desktop. From 3.2, GNOME is refining the project and starting to introduce new, modern GNOME applications that will deeply integrate with the GNOME 3 experience and which are designed for modern users.

GNOME 3.2 improves the sleek GNOME 3.0 by adding refinements to the visual theme, fully integrated messaging, new contacts framework and integration, improved document management, a new onscreen keyboard in addition to a number of other improvements. It introduces the building blocks for new application experiences and the basis for integration of online services.

As the GNOME release team explains, “the GNOME 3.2 release builds on the foundations that we have laid with 3.0 and offers a much more complete experience. From new applications for contacts and documents, a redesigned login screen, as well as high-end features such as color management and graphics tablets, it contains numerous new and exciting features and improvements. We are proud of what the GNOME community is delivering in this release, and we hope you like it. Give it a try!”

GNOME 3.2 is expected to be well received by users and its participant companies alike. Jim Whitehurst, President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat, stated “I am thrilled to see that the great innovation we saw in GNOME 3.0 continues to mature at such a rapid rate with 3.2.”

Juan Conde, Chief Free Software Officer at the Junta de Andalucía said, “Guadalinex has been relying on GNOME since its very inception. We currently have 600.000 desktops deployed in publicly-funded schools, and are now working in a new corporate GNOME 3 based desktop called GECOS (Guadalinex Standard Corporate Edition) that is designed for the everyday tasks of civil servants. GNOME 3 has been a big change for Guadalinex and I am glad to see that GNOME 3.2 improves the CSS and extension support to allow for easy user interface changes. For a government, accessibility is a must and GNOME provides it like no other. Thanks GNOME.”

“I’d like to offer my congratulations to GNOME team for their 3.2 release,” said Rick Spencer, Director of Engineering, Ubuntu, at Canonical. “Coming on the heels of the groundbreaking 3.0 release, 3.2
continues to offer innovation and refinement. We’re proud to have the great work in GNOME 3.2 as one of the pillars of Ubuntu 11.10. Ubuntu wouldn’t be what it is today without GNOME.”

Users and fans of GNOME have planned release parties in a number of cities around the world. The source code for GNOME 3.2 is freely available for download and redistribution and the release notes have been published. (Users are recommended to wait until GNOME 3.2 is available through a distribution or vendor, however.) Information on how to get GNOME 3.0 can be found on the GNOME 3 website. This site also provides 3.0 live images that you can use to try it out.

The GNOME Project was started in 1997 by two then-university students, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero. Their aim: to produce a free (as in freedom) desktop environment. Since then, GNOME has grown into a hugely successful enterprise. Used by millions of people across the world, it is a popular desktop environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX-type operating systems. The desktop has been utilised in successful, large-scale enterprise and public deployments, and the project’s developer technologies are utilized in a large number of popular mobile devices.

The GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME, comprised of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies. The Foundation is a member directed, 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to the GNOME project. 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. More information about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be found at www.gnome.org and foundation.gnome.org. Become a Friend of GNOME at http://www.gnome.org/friends/

For further comments and information, contact the GNOME press contact team at gnome-press-contact@gnome.org.

Karen Sandler Named New Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation

June 21, 2011: The GNOME Foundation today announced that it has appointed Karen Sandler as Executive Director. Sandler’s dedication to software freedom, her non-profits experience and her involvement in a wide range of free and open source software communities distinguish her as the logical choice for GNOME. “I’m very excited that Karen is joining the GNOME Foundation as Executive Director!”, says Stormy Peters, former Executive Director who has recently joined the GNOME Board as a new Director, “Karen brings a wealth of experience in free software projects and nonprofits as well as a passion for free software. That experience will be invaluable as GNOME continues to expand its reach with GNOME 3.0 and GNOME technologies.”

Sandler joins the GNOME Foundation from the Software Freedom Law Center where she has been General Counsel, advising a wide range of free and open source software organizations such as the Free Software Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation, the X.Org Foundation, Software in the Public Interest and the Software Freedom Conservancy. With SFLC, she also led an initiative advocating for free software on implantable medical devices. “Karen Sandler has been essential to the success of SFLC over the last six years,” said SFLC’s founder and executive director, Eben Moglen. “As our general counsel, she has been in the truest sense a lawyer’s lawyer. In representation of our clients she has been a superbly creative and conscientious practitioner. As mentor to younger lawyers here, she has set the finest of examples. The GNOME Foundation could not have chosen more wisely.” Sandler will continue to work on some legal matters pro bono at SFLC as well as regularly host an oggcast, Free as in Freedom, with Bradley Kuhn.

Sandler is a frequent speaker on free and open source software issues at corporate based conferences such as the the O’Reilly conferences and the Linux Foundation conferences, as well as community and nonprofit driven events such as the Free Software Foundation’s LibrePlanet and SCaLE. Prior to SFLC, she held legal positions at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, LLP and Clifford Chance, LLP. Sandler earned her legal degree from Columbia Law School and her engineering degree from the Cooper Union.

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

The GNOME Project was started in 1997 by two then-university students, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero. Their aim: to produce a free (as in freedom) desktop environment. Since then, GNOME has grown into a hugely successful enterprise. Used by millions of people across the world, it is the most popular desktop environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX-type operating systems. The desktop has been utilised in successful, large-scale enterprise and public deployments, and the project’s developer technologies are utilized in a large number of popular mobile devices.

For further comments and information, contact the GNOME press contact team at gnome-press-contact@gnome.org.

After a Successful First Round, GNOME Project Announces new Outreach Program for Women Interns

April 26, 2011 — BOSTON, Mass. — The GNOME 3.0 release has far more contributions by women than any previous release in GNOME history. This is largely thanks to the hard work of the first round of the Outreach Program for Women interns, who participated in the program from December 15, 2010 to March 15, 2011. All eight participants had their work included in the main branches of their projects and therefore included in GNOME 3.0. Following on the heels of the successful first round, the GNOME Project is delighted to announce the participants of a new round of the Outreach Program for Women internships.

The accomplishments of the first round participants make everyone in the GNOME community proud:

Luciana Fujii Pontello made Cheese webcam application capabilities available to other applications as a stand-alone library, and Laura Elisa Lucas Alday added support for SVG overlay effects and made a number of usability improvements. On completing her internship, Luciana Fujii Pontello became the maintainer of the Cheese project.
Tiffany Antopolski and Natalia Ruz wrote a large amount of GNOME 3 user help and participated in the User Help Hackfest in Toronto in March.
Chandni Verma made numerous improvements to the multi-user chat in Empathy, participated in the GNOME 3.0 Hackfest, and delivered a well-received talk about her work at the GNOME.Asia Summit in Bangalore in April.
Hellyna Ng implemented multiple features for notifications in GNOME Shell.
Eugenia Gabrielova made major improvements to searching in the Anjuta IDE, and Nanci de Brito Bonfim improved debugger integration.

Thanks to generous sponsors, Collabora, Google, Mozilla and the GNOME Foundation, GNOME was able to accept eight strong candidates for the new round. These eight women from North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Asia will be working on GNOME documentation, accessibility, art and localization from May 23 to August 22, 2011.

In addition to the eight Outreach Program for Women participants, the GNOME Project accepted seven female participants for Google Summer of Code, out of a total of 27 participants. This is an unprecedented number of female participants in Google Summer of Code for GNOME. In fact, the women’s outreach effort in GNOME was originally motivated by the lack of female applicants for Google Summer of Code. Scheduling the two internship programs to run in parallel allowed GNOME to encourage women who qualified for Google Summer of Code to apply for it as well. All women who applied for Google Summer of Code in 2011 found mentors and project ideas, made a first contribution, and navigated the application process with the help of the resources available through the Outreach Program for Women.

Cat Allman, Program Manager at the Open Source Programs Office at Google, says: “In a perfect world, outreach programs like the GNOME Outreach Program for Women would not be necessary. Until then, Google is proud to help support the work of the GNOME Project to involve more women in Free and Open Source Software development, and its continued participation in Google Summer of Code.”

“We were impressed by the accomplishments of Luciana Fujii Pontello and Chandni Verma, who we mentored in the previous round,” says Robert McQueen, Director and Co-Founder of Collabora. “We are happy to continue our support of this excellent initiative from the GNOME Project with both our sponsorship and mentorship.”

Mozilla joins Google and Collabora this year as a corporate sponsor of the program. “Mozilla is thrilled to be able to sponsor some promising new talent in the area of accessibility,” says David Bolter, Senior Software Engineer at Mozilla and a mentor for the program. “I really look forward to working with these dedicated and capable interns and helping them achieve great results.”

After completing the previous round as an intern and becoming the maintainer of the Cheese project, Luciana Fujii Pontello will be mentoring this round’s Google Summer of Code participant Raluca Elena Podiuc. “The GNOME Outreach Program for Women was crucial in my becoming a GNOME contributor,” says Fujii Pontello. “I believe it can bring more women to contribute to Free Software and I am happy to help this goal by mentoring one talented woman in Google Summer of Code.”

All of the accepted participants have used GNOME before, are avid Free Software users, and made a substantive contribution to GNOME as part of the application process. The participants will work remotely from home, guided by a mentor and communicating with other contributors over Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The community will be able to follow participants’ progress through their blog updates about their work that will be aggregated on Planet GNOME.

The Outreach Program for Women interns, as well as their location, project, and mentor(s), are:

Aline Duarte Bessa, Salvador, Brazil – Accessibility, Documentation – David Bolter and Joanmarie Diggs
Meg Ford, Chicago, USA – Accessibility, Art – David Bolter and Andreas Nilsson
Ekaterina Gerasimova, Berlin, Germany – Documentation – Shaun McCance
Julita Inca, Lima, Peru – Documentation – Phil Bull
Yu Liansu, Beijing, China – Art – Andreas Nilsson
Priscilla Mahlangu, Pretoria, South Africa – Localization – Friedel Wolff
Anita Reitere, Riga, Latvia – Documentation – Phil Bull
Kelly Sinnott, Las Vegas, USA – Documentation – Shaun McCance

Google Summer of Code female interns, as well as their location, project, and mentor, are:

Tiffany Antopolski, Toronto, Canada – Empathy – Danielle Madeley
Tamara Atanasoska, Skopje, Republic of Macedonia – Anjuta – Johannes Schmid
Neha Doijode, Karnataka, India – GNOME Shell – Marina Zhurakhinskaya
Nohemi Fernandez, Chicago, USA – GNOME Shell – Dan Winship
Raluca Elena Podiuc, Bucharest, Romania – Cheese – Luciana Fujii Pontello
Srishti Sethi, Rajasthan, India – GCompris – Bruno Coudoin
Madhumitha Viswanathan, Chennai, India – GTG – Luca Invernizzi

The Outreach Program for Women is organized by Marina Zhurakhinskaya, with help and support from Máirín Duffy, Stormy Peters, Rosanna Yuen and the GNOME Board of Directors. The essential work is done by the program’s mentors in helping the applicants and eventual participants contribute to their projects. Out of the eight Outreach Program for Women participants, three are being sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, two by Google, two by Mozilla, and one by Collabora. For more information about the Outreach Program for Women, visit http://projects.gnome.org/outreach/women .

The GNOME Project was started in 1997 by two then-university students, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero. Their aim: to produce a free (as in freedom) desktop environment. Since then, GNOME has grown into a hugely successful enterprise. Used by millions of people across the world, it is the most popular desktop environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX-type operating systems. The desktop has been utilized in successful, large-scale enterprise and public deployments, and the project’s developer technologies are utilized in a large number of popular mobile devices.

For further comments and information, contact the GNOME press contact team at gnome-press-contact@gnome.org.

GNOME 3.0 released: better for users, developers

Groton, MA, April 6 2011: Today, the GNOME Desktop project released GNOME 3.0, its most significant redesign of the computer experience in nine years. A revolutionary new user interface and new features for developers make this a historic moment for the free and open source desktop.

Within GNOME 3, GNOME Shell reimagines the user interface for the next generation of the desktop. This innovative interface allows users to focus on tasks while minimizing distractions such as notifications, extra workspaces, and background windows.

Jon McCann, one of GNOME Shell’s designers, says of the design team, “we’ve taken a pretty different approach in the GNOME 3 design that focuses on the desired experience and lets the interface design follow from that.” The result: “With any luck you will feel more focused, aware, effective, capable, respected, delighted, and at ease.” GNOME Shell aims to “help us cope with modern life in a busy world. Help us connect, stay on track, feel at ease and in control.” GNOME Shell, he says, will keep users “informed without being disrupted.”

The GNOME 3 development platform includes improvements in the display backend, a new API, improvements in search, user messaging, system settings, and streamlined libraries. GNOME 2 applications will continue to work in the GNOME 3 environment without modification, allowing developers to move to the GNOME 3 environment at their own pace. The GNOME 3 release notes include further details.

Matt Zimmerman, Ubuntu CTO at Canonical, praises GNOME 3: “In the face of constant change, both in software technology itself and in people’s attitudes toward it, long-term software projects need to reinvent themselves in order to stay relevant. I’m encouraged to see the GNOME community taking up this challenge, responding to the evolving needs of users and questioning the status quo.”

Miguel de Icaza, one of GNOME’s founders, celebrates the new release: “GNOME continues to innovate in the desktop space. The new GNOME Shell is an entire new user experience that was designed from the ground up to improve the usability of the desktop and giving both designers and developers a quick way to improve the desktop and adapt the user interface to new needs. By tightly integrating Javascript with the GNOME platform, designers were able to create and quickly iterate on creating an interface that is both pleasant and exciting to use. I could not be happier with the results.”

GNOME 3 is the cumulative work of five years of planning and design by the GNOME community. McCann notes: “Perhaps the most notable part of the design process is that everything has been done in the open. We’ve had full transparency for every decision (good and bad) and every change we’ve made. We strongly believe in this model. It is not only right in principle — it is just the best way in the long run to build great software sustainably in a large community.”

In partnership with Novell, Red Hat, other distributors, schools and governments, and user groups, GNOME 3 will reach millions of users around the world. Over 3500 people have contributed changes to the project’s code repositories, including the employees of 106 companies. GNOME 3 includes innumerable code changes since the 2.0 release 9 years ago.

Users and fans of GNOME have planned more than a hundred launch parties around the world. Users can download GNOME 3 from http://gnome3.org to try it immediately, or wait for distributions to carry it over the coming months. GNOME 3 continues to push new frontiers in user interaction.

The GNOME Project was started in 1997 by two then-university students, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero. Their aim: to produce a free (as in freedom) desktop environment. Since then, GNOME has grown into a hugely successful enterprise. Used by millions of people across the world, it is the most popular desktop environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX-type operating systems. The desktop has been utilised in successful, large-scale enterprise and public deployments, and the project’s developer technologies are utilised in a large number of popular mobile devices.

For further comments and information, contact the GNOME press contact team at gnome-press-contact@gnome.org.

April Fools! GNOME 3.0 Rescheduled for September 2011 Release

April 1 (April Fools’ Day), 2011 — BANGALORE, India — The GNOME Release Team met in India this week to discuss the state of GNOME 3. The Release Team came to a consensus opinion that one more cycle will be required before GNOME 3.0 is ready to be released. The decision was communicated to and approved by the GNOME Foundation Board on a conference call.

The delay of the release comes for a number of reasons. The primary indicator of the unreadiness of the release is the massive number of exceptions that have been requested and granted during the hard code freeze period. There have been several last-minute API changes that have the potential to harm the stability of the release.

The recent announcement that the Mozilla project would discontinue support for embedding has cast doubts on the technical underpinnings of the new GNOME shell. There are also concerns about the frequently shifting visual design and questions about its performance and portability. The release team is also concerned about the possible near-future release of GTK4 and what that means for GNOME as a development platform.

Foremost, the GNOME project is committed to only releasing the highest quality software. Dozens of release-critical blocker bugs remain open with little chance of being fixed by the time of the release.

At this time, there will be no new release in the 2.x series and all developer effort will focus on improvements to GNOME 3.0. The release is being delayed for a full 6 months to avoid scheduling problems for our downstream distributors. During this 6 month period, we will reopen module proposals in the usual way. We are particularly encouraging module proposals from alternate desktop shells, which will be given careful consideration.

The Release Team would like to thank the developers who continue to put tremendous amounts of work into the GNOME project. The level of the quality of the code is at the highest that it has ever been and there is no doubt that we will easily have the best desktop on the planet by September 2011.

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.

Composed 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 and foundation.gnome.org.
Media Enquiries

GNOME Foundation Marketing Coordinator
Email: gnome-press-contact@gnome.org

GNOME Project Announces Outreach Program for Women Interns

November 5, 2010 — BOSTON, Mass. — The GNOME project is proud to announce the participants of the Outreach Program for Women internships. Thanks to generous sponsors, Google, Collabora and the GNOME Foundation, GNOME was able to accept eight really strong candidates. These eight women from North America, South America and Asia will be working on GNOME technologies from December 15, 2010 to March 15, 2011.

“Google actively encourages students to get involved in software development through free software,” says Cat Allman, Program Manager at the Open Source Programs Office at Google. “Google is proud to help support this innovative global program for technical women and GNOME.”

By creating a program specifically tailored to encourage women to participate in free software development, the GNOME Project has succeeded in reaching a diverse group of women from around the world. The dates for the program ensure that students in the Southern Hemisphere are able to participate. A follow-on program is planned for June through August of 2011, to run in parallel with Google Summer of Code.

“This is an excellent initiative from the GNOME project to bring new enthusiasm and contributors into the project and we’re proud to support it with both our sponsorship and mentors,” says Robert McQueen, Director and Co-Founder of Collabora. “We’re really looking forwards to working with these highly motivated and skilled interns and seeing some great results.”

All of the accepted participants have used GNOME before, are avid users of all types of free software, are in process or have completed a technical education, and made a good non-trivial contribution to GNOME as part of the application process. The participants will work remotely from home, while being guided by a mentor and communicating with other contributors over Internet Relay Chat (IRC). The participants, as well as their location, project, and mentor, are:

Tiffany Antopolski, Toronto, Canada – Documentation – Paul Cutler
Nanci de Brito Bonfim, Salvador, Brazil – Anjuta – Sébastien Granjoux
Luciana Fujii Pontello, Belo Horizonte, Brazil – Cheese – Thiago Sousa Santos
Eugenia Gabrielova, Chicago, USA – Anjuta – Johannes Schmid
Laura Elisa Lucas Alday, Buenos Aires, Argentina – Cheese – Daniel Siegel
Hellyna Ng, Johor, Malaysia / Singapore – GNOME Shell – Marina Zhurakhinskaya
Natalia Andrea Ruz Leiva, Valparaíso, Chile – Documentation – Paul Cutler
Chandni Verma, Lucknow, India – Empathy – Danielle Madeley

In addition, the GNOME Foundation is sponsoring two of the participants, Tiffany Antopolski and Eugenia Gabrielova, to attend GNOME’s Boston Summit, which is held November 6-8, 2010 in Boston, USA. This will give them a unique opportunity to meet people in the GNOME community, including ones they will be working with, and attend sessions about various projects. Other participants will be encouraged to attend GNOME events in their regions as soon as the opportunities present themselves.

The community will be able to follow the progress of all participants through their weekly blog updates about their work that will be aggregated on Planet GNOME.

This is a second time GNOME is organizing an internships program for women. The trailblazing Women’s Summer Outreach Program was run in July and August of 2006 by Chris Ball and Hanna Wallach. That time, the program had 6 participants, with three being sponsored by the GNOME Foundation and three being sponsored by Google. The number of qualified applicants that year showed that women are eager to get involved in free software development, but might need an extra encouragement and someone they know they can ask questions to get started.

This year’s program is organized by Marina Zhurakhinskaya, with great help from Chris Ball, Emily Chen, Paul Cutler, Máirín Duffy, Diego Escalante Urrelo, Pockey Lam, Danielle Madeley, Stormy Peters, Germán Póo-Caamaño, Johannes Schmid, Daniel Siegel, Hanna Wallach, and Rosanna Yuen. Out of the eight participants, four are being sponsored by Google, three by the GNOME Foundation, and one by Collabora.

The next round of the Outreach Program for Women internships is planned for June through August, 2011. Applicants who were not accepted for this round, or women who have not yet applied but are interested in GNOME, are encouraged to stay involved in GNOME and apply then or in a year. The GNOME Project would like to once again thank its sponsors, and encourage companies to consider sponsoring the next round of internships. We expect an even larger field of applicants in 2011, and would like to expand the number of available internships.

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

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

GNOME Foundation Executive Director
Stormy Peters
Email: gnome-press-contact@gnome.org
Phone: +1-617-206-3947

GNOME Project Receives $15,000 for Accessibility Work

October 25, 2010 — BOSTON, Mass. — The GNOME Project has received two grants for a total of $15,000 from Mozilla and from the F123.org-Mais Diferenças partnership for accessibility work.

Mozilla has once again stepped up to support GNOME accessibility (a11y) work with a $10,000 grant. The F123-Mais Diferenças partnership has awarded a grant of $5,000 in total. This is the second accessibility grant that GNOME has received from Mozilla in the 2010 calendar year.

The F123.org-Mais Diferenças partnership has awarded GNOME for its design and implementation of cursor and focus tracking on the eZoom module of Compiz fusion, and other accessibility improvements in GNOME to benefit persons with low vision and other disabilities.

Mozilla is helping to fund improvements in the Orca screen reader. The Mozilla Project has helped to identify performance problems when Orca interacts with Gecko-based applications and other desktop applications. The funds will be used to perform a review of Orca performance bottlenecks and help fix problems that are identified. Orca is an extremely important tool for users of GNOME with reduced vision.

“The web is an integral part of everyday life and it’s important for it to be accessible to everyone.” says David Bolter of Mozilla. “I am thrilled we are again contributing funds to the GNOME Foundation for critical efforts, including Orca, and events like the accessibility hackfest at CSUN.”

GNOME used the previous funds for accessibility to participate in the CSUN Conference. CSUN is one of the largest and most important gatherings on the topic of technology and persons with disabilities. While most technology that was showcased at this event was proprietary and typically had a high price point, GNOME offers a free personal computing platform that was feature rich, easy to use, and accessible to people with many disabilities.

Because of different laws and regulations, technology accessibility is a consideration and concern primarily to large employers and government agencies. It is deeply important that free software solutions be at par with proprietary applications in order to gain adoption by government and large employers. The GNOME Project held three talks at CSUN, demonstrating Orca, smaller assistive technology projects, and an introduction of the collaborative development model employed by open source projects like GNOME.

The GNOME Foundation and Mozilla are committed to open source, open standards, and open formats. Both organizations and their contributors contribute to numerous projects to ensure an open Web and open desktop platform for all users. Part of that effort is working hard to ensure users with physical disabilities are able to make use of a free desktop and Web browser.
About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

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

GNOME Foundation Executive Director
Stormy Peters
Email: gnome-press-contact@gnome.org
Phone: +1-617-206-3947

Desktop Summit 2011 to be held in Berlin, Germany August 6th – 12th 2011

Berlin, 6th October, 2010 – The Desktop Summit is a co-located event which features the yearly contributor conferences of the GNOME and KDE communities, GUADEC and Akademy. Next year the conference will take place from 6 to 12 August, 2011 in Berlin at the Humboldt University in Unter den Linden. The event will feature keynotes, talks, workshops and team building events. The Desktop Summit website is now online at desktopsummit.org.

The GNOME and KDE communities develop the majority of Free Software desktop technology. Increasingly, they cooperate on underlying infrastructure. By holding their annual developer flagship events in the same location, the two projects will further foster collaboration and discussion between their developer communities. Moreover, KDE and GNOME aim to work more closely with the rest of the desktop and mobile open source community. The summit presents a unique opportunity for main actors to work together and improve the free and open source desktop for all.

“We are proud to be able to welcome the participants of the Desktop Summit 2011 to the capital region next year,” says Almuth Nehring-Venus, Permanent Secretary for Economics, Technology and Women?s Issues from the Berlin Senate. “I hope that the joint conference of the two largest Free Desktop projects GNOME and KDE will provide an additional boost for our Open Source/Open Standard initiative within the framework of Berlin?s IT strategy and therefore also to further high-value jobs in our region.”

At the Desktop Summit 2011, KDE and GNOME expect well over a thousand core contributors, prominent open source technology leaders, representatives from government, education and corporate backgrounds, and open source desktop engineers, usability experts and designers. Local and international IT industry are invited to learn about and join in developing the latest innovative desktop technology. The TSB Innovation Agency Berlin GmbH and the Berlin Senate are supporting the event locally.

The registration for the Desktop Summit will open on 1 February 2011 and a call for papers will be issued. Talk submissions will be due on 15th of March and on 15 April the conference program will be announced. Saturday 6 August kicks off three days of joint keynotes, talks and social events followed by four days of collaborative workshops. The conference officially ends on Friday, 12 August with a closing.

About the Desktop Summit

The Desktop Summit is a joint initiative by GNOME and KDE to encourage the development and use of a free desktop. The shared objectives include the exchange of technology, cooperation on projects and developing new opportunities with Free and Open Source Software on the desktop.

The first Desktop Summit in 2009 was a huge success: More than 850 free software advocates from 46 countries gathered together in Las Palmas on Gran Canaria to discuss and enhance the free desktop experience. The summit accomplished its goal of increasing co-operation and throughout the conference there were many examples of improvements to current and development of new shared technologies.

The Desktop Summit website can be found on http://www.desktopsummit.org.

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

About KDE and KDE e. V.

KDE is an international community that creates Free Software for desktop and portable computing. Among KDE’s products are innovative workspaces for Linux and UNIX platforms, the KDE Platform for rapid development and a comprehensive range of applications. KDE offers hundreds of software titles in many categories including communication and groupware, office producitvity, web applications, multimedia, entertainment, education, 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. Applications built on KDE Platform 4 run natively on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X.

KDE e. V. is a nonprofit association that represents the international community supported KDE operating legally, financially and organizationally. More informations about KDE and KDE e. V. can be found at http://www.kde.org and http://ev.kde.org

For further informations and interviews please contact us:

Offical contact Desktop Summit 2011:
Mirko Böhm, Spokesman c/o KDAB (Deutschland) GmbH & Co. KG Tempelhofer Ufer 11, D-10963 Berlin phone +49 (0)30 – 5 21 32 54-70 http://www.desktopsummit.org

Press contact Desktop Summit (WORLD): Jos Poortvliet, jos@opensuse.org
mobile +31(0)6 22 37 75 45

Press contact Desktop Summit (DACH): Thomas Keup, thomas.keup@opencoffee.de
mobile +49(0)171 – 4 18 00 84

Organizer GNOME Foundation: Stormy Peters, Executive Director e-mail: stormy@gnome.org
http://foundation.gnome.org

Organizer KDE e. V.: Claudia Rauch, Business Manager e-mail: rauch@kde.org
http://ev.kde.org

GNOME Foundation Launches Tomboy Online Alpha

BOSTON, Mass — September 17, 2010 — The GNOME Foundation has launched an alpha for Tomboy Online this week as a first step towards an integrated Web and desktop free software stack. Just in time for Software Freedom Day on September 18, the GNOME Foundation is taking a major step towards the future of client computing.

The Tomboy Online service integrates with the Tombody notetaking application for the GNOME desktop. Available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, Tomboy allows users to jot down notes quickly and easily, but also has rich functionality and a plugin architecture that enables more detailed note-taking.

Tomboy Online allows users to view, edit, and synchronize their Tombody notes online. Tomboy Online is powered by Snowy, a Web application written in Python on the Django Web framework and licensed under the Affero General Public License (AGPL). The AGPL is key to ensuring user freedom via Web services, so that any implementation of Snowy (like Tomboy Online) will be open and provide users with full source code on demand. Tomboy users can take full advantage of the convenience of Web applications while still enjoying the freedoms they’ve come to expect from the GNOME desktop and application stack.

“The GNOME Project is thinking hard about how to ensure user freedom in the face of highly functional and ubiquitious Web applications,” said Stormy Peters, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. “While GNOME already provides a user-friendly and full-featured desktop and application set, users are embracing online services en masse. The GNOME Project wants to continue protecting user freedom and providing quality tools via online services, and Tomboy Online is just one of the ways we can do that.”

The launch comes the same week as Software Freedom Day, an annual celebration of Free Software. Free and open source software advocates around the world work focus on Software Freedom Day to demonstrate software and spread the word through events and demonstrations.

Tomboy Online is currently in limited alpha while the service undergoes extensive testing. The beta phase does not yet have a firm date, but availability is expected near the launch of GNOME 3.0.

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

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

Media Enquiries

GNOME Foundation Executive Director
Stormy Peters
Email: gnome-press-contact@gnome.org
Phone: +1-617-206-3947

Desktop Summit 2011 to be held in Berlin, Germany

Berlin, 6th October, 2010 – The Desktop Summit is a co-located event which features the yearly contributor conferences of the GNOME and KDE communities, GUADEC and Akademy. Next year the conference will take place from 6 to 12 August, 2011 in Berlin at the Humboldt University in Unter den Linden. The event will feature keynotes, talks, workshops and team building events. The Desktop Summit website is now online at desktopsummit.org.

“We are proud to be able to welcome the participants of the Desktop Summit 2011 to the capital region next year,” says Almuth Nehring-Venus, Permanent Secretary for Economics, Technology and Women’s Issues from the Berlin Senate. “I hope that the joint conference of the two largest Free Desktop projects GNOME and KDE will provide an additional boost for our Open Source/Open Standard initiative within the framework of Berlin?s IT strategy and therefore also to further high-value jobs in our region.”