GNOMG

A heartbreaking look at software patents

My friend and former colleague from SFLC, Dan Ravicher, wrote to me about this little girl who relies on an app to speak. The app is under threat for patent infringement and Apple has already removed it from the itunes store. This story has already got some press, but now the app has actually been removed from itunes, and the parents are worried that Apple will remotely update the device to remove it. What amazes me about this story is that it echoes some of my own feelings towards my pacemaker/defibrillator. It shows how real people are increasingly relying on technology that they have less and less control over for extremely important aspects of our lives. While malfunction of the app isn’t a concern for this family in the same way it is for medical devices like mine, they live in fear that one day their daughter’s voice will just stop working and there’s very little they can do about it. It’s another side of the software patent issues and lockdown that I really hadn’t considered before. Many thanks to Dan for his work with the Public Patent Foundation.

Don’t forget to vote!

Today’s the last day to vote for the GNOME board of directors! You’ve got until 23:59 UTC – that’s only 4:59pm if you live on the west coast of the United States…

The candidates are listed here.

Help GNOME reach its accessibility fundraising goal!

We just posted this item on gnome.org:

We’re closing in on our goal of $20,000 for our accessibility campaign. If you haven’t already, take a look at the testimonial by Diego Sánchez that we’ve been lucky to include. As Diego says, GNOME 3 has really helped him: “I’m happy because I can now use the computer in my classroom without any assistance.” Our accessibility team‘s work has made a big difference in many people’s lives, but we still have a long way to go. Help us make our goal and donate now via our Friends of GNOME program!

If you haven’t given the our accessibility campaign already, I encourage you to do so! I am so inspired by the work that Alejandro Piñeiro, Joanmarie Diggs, Juan José Marin and the rest of the team do. Thanks again to Robert Cole and Diego Sánchez for allowing us to highlight how much GNOME and GNU/Linux has meant to them.

Texas Linuxfest

Nathan Willis just filled me in about the Texas Linux Fest, which is going to be on August 4th in San Antonio. It’s right after GUADEC (and I won’t be able to go since travel will then be off limits for me!) but the CFP is open until June 15th. I hope that some GNOME folks are able to submit talks or go!

Exciting personal news!

As some of you know already, I’ve got good news – I’m pregnant! I’ve put off blogging about it, as I hate sharing personal information online (yes, I really hate talking about my heart condition but I feel like it’s worth it to underscore the importance of software freedom). It’s time that I informed the whole GNOME community though, so that you all know what’s going on. I’m due in September, which means that I’ll be pretty pregnant at GUADEC.

If you do the math and count back, you’ll notice that I was extremely busy during my first trimester with loads of travel and major projects. Luckily, I felt great so it was easy to work whole-heartily on stuff I feel so passionately about. For some reason, the past month hasn’t been as easy so there have been times that I’ve struggled to stay on track for GNOME. While I’ve been forced to cut down on my travel during this time and turn down talks that I would have loved to give, I’m definitely planning on going to GUADEC. I’m also going to try to make it to OSCON, but I’ll have to see how my health is. I don’t think I remember seeing any pregnant speakers at other free software conferences, so I wish I could go to more.

I thank you for your understanding and support, and will do my best to put in that extra effort through the rest of my pregnancy.

On a geekier note – I’m excited to bring another free software and GNOME user into the world!

Throw your hat in the ring!

This Sunday is the deadline to decide to run for the GNOME board! While it can be a lot of work, serving on the GNOME board is a great way to contribute to the community and make sure that things are run in the way you think they should be. (Plus, you’d get to be one of my bosses!) I’ve only seen a couple of candidacies announced, but I’m hoping to see a lot more this weekend – we need seven directors in total. The details are all here.

More stuff I’ve done recently…

I lost a little time to being sick but in the past two weeks, I:

• did some final revisions on the GNOME’s 990
• looked into the ongoing UK open standards discussion, and discussed preparing a comments with SFLC. Thanks to Glyn Moody for letting me
  know about it and to SFLC for working with me. I’ll keep you posted as to our comment (the deadline’s been recently extended a month).
• worked on some trademark issues for GNOME
• finished fundraising for our Outreach Program for Women, and started to put together a press release with Marina – that should be coming very soon. I also helped wrap up the tough decisions about which applicants to accept and took care of some paperwork related to the program.
• discussed keynote invitees for GUADEC and got to invite a couple of speakers! I hope they come! I also started working on looking for sponsors for GUADEC.
• attended a couple of GNOME.Asia planning meetings and worked on a few action items too. That group is working so hard to put the conference together, despite being thrown quite a few curve balls along the way.
• followed some of the important discussions going on in the GNOME community and participated in a number of backchannel discussions. I’m glad that the substantive discussion is being talked about openly and I’m glad we’re committed to improving as a community. One thing I would recommend doing (and I think I might make this its own blog post) is taking the time to positively react to good emails and discussion points that go around. When we see something negative we’re quick to react but in general we rarely thank those who take the time to be good communicators. Just a thought! So if you liked an email that you read, or thought the tone was good or supportive or something like that, quickly write the person a private email to tell them so!
• guest lectured a class on free culture and free software with Justin Colaninno at Columbia Law School. I’ve been doing it ever semester for the past few years, and it’s very fun to see how much the knowledge about the topics has changed and gotten broader acceptance.

What I’ve been up to recently

Here are some things I’ve been up to recently:

• I talked to journalists. You can see my post here about some of the latest stuff. My interview with NTN24 was hilarious. There was a terrible connection for the transmission for my earpiece and I could only make out a few words of the questions. So I just answered what I thought they were asking! I think it worked out in the end. Hopefully more of these interviews and stories will get published soon.
• I attended the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, where I gave a talk about trademarks, mostly from the perspective of being at GNOME. It was a fun talk to give, and a little different from my previous legal talks in that it was very much informed by my perspective of being Executive Director of GNOME. The slides are available on the Linux Foundation’s website. I also had a chance to catch up with a lot of different GNOME folks, and attended Juan José Sánchez Penas’ talk GNOME: Beyond the Traditional Desktop (Or How GNOME Can Help Those Building Linux Platforms for Mobile Devices) which was a great talk that featured a lot of the cool work that Igalia is doing. It was also great to catch up with Keith Packard, who filled me in on some stuff regarding Wayland that I hadn’t known. There were many others who were fantastic to see too. Thanks to the Linux Foundation for sponsoring my travel.
• While in San Francisco, I visited the nice folks at Zareason, who helped me with a few problems I was having with my laptop. It was great to see their offices and emerge with a problem free computer. At the end of my trip, I swung by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on my way to the airport. There are a number of ways I think that EFF and GNOME can work together, so I’m really excited about that.
• I participated in organizational meetings for GNOME.Asia. The organizing team is doing a great job! Check out the Call for Papers and submit yours soon (the deadline is approaching).
• I helped Marina with some of the fundraising and logistics for the Outreach Program for Women. The applicants are again very very strong!
• I recorded another oggcast with Bradley. This episode includes a talk from FOSDEM by the charming Michael Meeks, who talks about copyright assignment. I think it’s a pretty interesting talk.
• I did a bunch of housekeeping, like catching up on email, handled a couple of trademark inquiries, etc.
• I emailed potential keynoters for GUADEC. I’ve gotten a preliminary response from one of them that’s pretty exciting. Stay tuned!

medical devices in the press

I’m really excited about some of the press that my medical devices advocacy has been getting recently. Yesterday, there was an article on the BBC website, which starts:

Karen Sandler has a big heart. And that’s not just because she is head of the Gnome Foundation – a non-profit community group dedicated to making and giving away free software for PCs.

I’m also going to be interviewed on a Spanish language tv show tomorrow, which should be fun! (The interview is in English, thankfully.) So tune in, if you want…

I’ll keep you posted here if more of these interviews turn unto published material.

GNOME 3.4 is here!

I’m so excited that GNOME 3.4 has been released. There is a lot of good information in the press release and the release notes that were published today. GNOME 3.4 is great – it’s much more polished and also fixes a number of small things that make a much better user experience (including some users found annoying in the previous GNOME 3 releases).

Some of the improvements include:

• Smoother scrolling, better systems settings
• Document search
• Video calling added to Empathy
• More intelligent pop-ups and message tray
• Better accessibility support
• Sleek and zippy Epiphany (which is also renamed to “Web”)
• Better hardware support
• A lot of small enhancements made through our Every Detail Matters effort

Since version 3.2 six months ago, GNOME received 41,000 contributions made by 1,275 people – incredible! Many thanks to the whole GNOME community for working together on this release, and to Matthias Clasen, Allan Day, Andreas Nilsson and Andre Klapper for working so hard on all of the coordination to get the release out the door.