We are thrilled to report that GNOME.Asia is a founding member of KAIYUANSHE(开源社) launched Oct 16, 2014. KAIYUANSHE roughly translated as “open source alliance,” is a group of enterprises, communities, and individuals in China supporting and promoting free and open source software (FOSS).
KAIYUANSHE will support the growing needs of China’s growing software industry by providing developers with the necessary education, tools and services to foster a healthy and robust free software ecosystem. Additionally providing education on FOSS standards, licensing and verification, development tools, FOSS project assessment and other necessary support and services to organizations, developers and academic institutions.
The GNOME community, represented by GNOME Asia Summit members will actively contribute in the early phases of KAIYUANSHE to many areas including documentation ,media and by participating in the KAIYUANSHE China Campus Tour.
“It’s fantastic that GNOME.Asia is joining KAIYUANSHE as a founding member”, said Karen Sandler, the Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy and currently serving on the GNOME Foundation’s Board of Directors, “I have always been incredibly impressed by the GNOME.Asia team and the great work they have done in spreading free software in Asia. I’m not surprised that KAIYUANSHE is already successful, and I can’t wait to see more of what this initiative accomplishes.”
The GNOME Asia Committee is pleased to announce that the upcoming GNOME.Asia Summit 2015 will be hosted in Depok Indonesia May 7-9 2015. It will be a great place to celebrate and explore the many new features and enhancements to GNOME 3.
The GNOME.Asia Summit 2015 will be hosted at the Universitas Indonesia, which has a high number of students and people interested in Free/Open Source software. Consequently, there is a very committed local team which already has significant experience in organizing successful events. The venue is located in Depok City, a gateway city of the West Java Province, 30 km from Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. Hosting Asia Summit 2015 in Depok will bring the spotlight on GNOME and make an impact locally, regionally, and internationally.
“We are looking forward to welcome the GNOME community to Indonesia, a country that has a large Free and Open source community, we are excited that they will gather for GNOME Asia Summit 2015” said Estu Fardani, a member of the local organizing team.
The GNOME Asia Committee want thank everyone who participated in the GNOME Asia Summit 2015 bidding process.
Thank you so much for your donations and help in spreading the word! We are overwhelmed and reinvigorated by the support we received from everyone, which has resulted in the following joint announcement that we’re publishing with Groupon:
“Groupon has agreed to change its Gnome product name to resolve the GNOME Foundation’s concerns. Groupon is now abandoning all of its 28 pending trademark applications. The parties are working together on a mutually acceptable solution, a process that has already begun.”
There is something amazing about free software – it’s ethical technology but it also creates a fantastic community of people who are willing to fight for what’s right. It’s taken us a tremendous amount of time and effort to deal with this issue in the months leading up to our announcement and it will take us a little time to regroup. We’ll keep you posted as the matter resolves fully.
GNOME has launched a campaign to raise funds for protecting the GNOME trademarks.
Recently, Groupon launched Gnome, a tablet-based point of sale (POS) system that Groupon describes as a “platform” and an “operating system”.
The GNOME Foundation is concerned and sees their long-established mark for Free Software, GNOME, endangered. The GNOME Foundation asks for ideological and monetary support to cover the costs of opposing the marks Groupon applied to register, which were estimated to be around 80,000 USD.
“I cannot believe Groupon was not aware of GNOME, the Free Software desktop environment and application suite, when it chose the name. Especially as they claim to be ‘fueled by open source‘,” said Tobias Mueller, one of the directors of the GNOME Foundation.
“We will not give up but fight their use of our name which we have established over the last 17 years to provide users all over the world with high quality Free Software solutions.”
“Millions of people who use GNU/Linux based systems use GNOME or GNOME-related technologies, such as GLib or GTK+. We must not let a billion-dollar-company take the well-established name of one of the biggest Free Software communities,” Tobias added. “If you want to help GNOME defend its trademark and promote Free Software, visit the campaign’s page, share the link, and let Groupon know that they behaved terribly”.
GNOME also made a press contact available for further questions or interviews.
Several members of the GNOME Engagement Team will gather this weekend at FSCONS. FSCONS is an annual gathering for free software in the Nordic countries, taking place in Gothenburg Sweden.
GNOME will be present with a booth where contributors will show the latest version of GNOME,
answer questions and help new people get involved. There are also plans for an Engagement
hackfest.
“We are excited to have this many GNOME contributors attending FSCONS 2014” -Oliver Propst FSCONS organizer and Engagement team contributor
Details about the event are available on the wiki.
GNOME Summit 2014 starts tomorrow. The GNOME Summit is an annual gathering of contributors from around the world that features three-days of discussion and working sessions. After the last summit, held in Montreal it’s this year back in Boston.
Scheduled topics include: Wayland, App development, Privacy and the GNOME Continuous build system. The summit is an informal event and everyone is welcome.
On Saturday Richard Stallman, President of the Free Software Foundation will be delivering an address. More information about the 2014 edition of the summit can be found on the wiki.
The foundation wants to thank MIT for providing the venue and Red Hat for sponsoring breakfasts.
With GNOME 3.14 just released, the GNOME project has published a video that demos the new GNOME version. The short film is a great way to learn about the new features – and see some of the attention to detail – in the new release.
GNOME 3.14, the latest version of GNOME 3, has been released. Announcing the new version, Matthias Clasen said: “This is another exciting release for GNOME, and brings many new features and improvements.”
The new release is the result of six months’ work by the GNOME project, and includes 28,859 changes by 871 contributors. Highlights for 3.14 include:
New animations in the Activities Overview, along with new window animations.
Automatic handling for Wi-Fi hotspots that require you to login (so called “captive portals”).
A redesigned Weather application, which uses geolocation to show the weather for your current location.
Support for browsing Google pictures in Photos.
Improved touchscreen support, with multi-touch gestures for both the system and applications.
The latest GNOME release also includes major improvements for developers, including GTK+ Inspector (a new utlity to examine and modify running GTK+ applications), the ability to use SVG assets as a part of GTK+ themes, improved touchscreen support, and major progress towards Wayland.
More information about the latest version, including details on all the new features, can be found in the release notes.
Additional details, including links to the 3.14 screenshot pack and test image, can be found in the press release.
Orinda, CA– The GNOME Project is proud to announce the release of GNOME 3.14 today. This milestone release in the GNOME 3 series brings exciting new features, bug fixes, and an enhanced application development platform. Major new features include automatic handling for captive portals, network-aware sharing, Google photos support, and touchscreen gestures.
Jeff Fortin Tam, GNOME Foundation President, said: “With multitouch and gestures support coming to GTK+, as well as maturing support for the next-generation Wayland display protocol, GNOME is paving the way for the future of the Free Software desktop and mobile ecosystem at large. It is great to see that applications have undergone, as always, a great amount of refinement; routing in GNOME Maps and improved PDF annotation features in Evince, for instance, are long-awaited features that I’m very eager to try out in GNOME 3.14.”
GNOME 3.14 highlights include:
New animations in the Activities Overview, along with new window animations.
Automatic handling for Wi-Fi hotspots that require you to login (so called “captive portals”).
A redesigned Weather application, which uses geolocation to show the weather for your current location.
Support for browsing Google pictures in Photos.
Improved touchscreen support, with multi-touch gestures for both the system and applications.
Developers can look forward to a new live inspector for GTK+ applications, enhanced CSS capabilties, major progress on Wayland adoption, and a significant update for GNOME’s Human Interface Guidelines.
Distributions and partners have welcomed the latest GNOME release. Scott Reeves, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop Manager, said: “The GNOME 3 desktop provides a stable, feature rich experience for individual end users and for professional environments as well. GNOME 3 has reached a point of integration and polish to the extent that we will ship GNOME 3 as the desktop for our enterprise customers. We are invested in and contributing to the GNOME project and look forward to the additional functionality and improvements in GNOME 3.14 and beyond. We intend to continue including GNOME 3 in subsequent releases of our SUSE Linux Enterprise product.”
The news was also welcomed by Debian’s GNOME team. Jordi Mallach, one of the team’s members: “The Debian GNOME packagers are very happy to see another GNOME release which brings even more polish and new features to the already very reliable 3.x foundation. We’ve done our best to make sure Debian ‘jessie’ will ship with GNOME 3.14, as the improvements over previous releases will really make a difference for our next stable release. Congrats to the GNOME community!”
More information about the latest version, including details on all the new features, can be found in the release notes. A screenshot pack is also available, as well as a test image so you can try it for yourself.
The GNOME Foundation thanks all of the contributors for their hard work during this release cycle and all of its sponsors for their support.
About GNOME
GNOME 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 around the world, it is one of the most popular environments for GNU/Linux and UNIX-type operating systems. GNOME’s software has been utilized in successful, large-scale enterprise and public deployments.
The GNOME community is made up of hundreds of contributors from all over the world, many of whom are volunteers. This community is supported by the GNOME Foundation, an independent non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal assistance. The Foundation is a democratic institution that is directed by its members, who are all active GNOME contributors. GNOME and its Foundation work to promote software freedom through the creation of innovative, accessible, and beautiful user experiences.
The GNOME foundation are pleased to publish the 2013 Annual Report . In the Report you can read about the foundation activities during 2013, some of the highlights include details about the continuous success of the OPW program and the many hackfests that took place during the last year.
“The 2013 Annual Report highlight how vibrant the GNOME project is and represents itself a real community effort.” Oliver Propst, Annual Report coordinator.
The foundation want to thank Friends of GNOME and advisory board members who support the foundation and its operations.
