Thomas Wood

Straight from the “wow-that-was-quick” department, I have another two sponsors to announce.

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The GUADEC team are pleased to announce the first gold sponsor for GUADEC 2007 is the Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation (previously OSDL) are renewing their sponsorship from last year, further enforcing their commitment to Open and Free software projects.

Canonical/Ubuntu will be sponsoring GUADEC at silver level for the first time this year. Canonical/Ubuntu is a very big user of GNOME software, so we are particulary pleased that they are confirming their commitment to supporting the GNOME project.

The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007 by the merger of the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group, it sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and is supported by leading Linux and open source companies and developers from around the world. The Linux Foundation promotes, protects and standardizes Linux by providing unified resources and services needed for open source to successfully compete with closed platforms.

Ubuntu/Canonical

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.

Download Ubuntu from www.ubuntu.com/download.

To learn about commercial support for Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu, please see www.canonical.com/support. For more information visit www.canonical.com or www.ubuntu.com.

I was quite pleased about the response to my Google Summer of Code idea to build version 3 of art.gnome.org. Even better was that three or four students applied to work on the project, and better still was that one of the applications was accepted!

So a big congratulations to Bruno Santos (pheres on irc) for his great application. He’s now been hanging out in #gnome-art on irc.gnome.org, meeting some of the regulars and discussing ideas. He’s started his own blog about the project, which I hope will be included in this years SoC planet (if there is one?).

Many thanks to all those who took an interest in my project. I hope art.gnome.org can now become a real community website for artists in and around the GNOME project.

Ready everyone, it’s BIG SPONSOR LOGOS TIME (again)!

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The GUADEC team are happy to announce a further three more sponsors have been confirmed for this year’s GUADEC. Intel and Fluendo are sponsoring at Silver level and renewing their sponsorship again from last year. Collabora are sponsoring GUADEC for the first time this year, also at silver level. A big thank you to all three of them for their support of GUADEC.

Collabora

Collabora Ltd. is a Cambridge, UK based company specialising in open source development. With expertise in both real-time communications and open-source technologies including XMPP, SIP, RTP, D-Bus, GStreamer and Gtk+, it specialises in bringing companies and the open source software community together. Collabora provides clients, including Nokia and OLPC, with the knowledge, experience and infrastructure to meet their targets whilst allowing them to be an integral part of the open source community. Collabora has created a network of open source engineers from Europe and North America, and continues to expand this web further to include talented developers from around the world.

Fluendo

Fluendo is a company specialized in delivering products and consulting services on Unix and Linux multimedia. Their flagship product is the streaming media server Flumotion. Fluendo supports the development of the GStreamer multimedia framework, which is emerging as the standard media framework on Unix and Linux platforms. This company, based in Barcelona, is heavily involved in various aspects related to GUADEC, like the coordination of the video coverage.

Intel®

This year 100 million people around the world will discover digital for the first time. This year 150 million more people will become part of the wireless world. This year the living room will grow more interactive and the digital divide will shrink. This year more people will be using technology in more fascinating ways than ever imagined. And behind all of this progress you’ll find innovative Intel® technology. For decades, Intel Corporation has developed technology enabling the computer and Internet revolution that has changed the world. Intel® Software Development Products for Linux allow you to harness the power of on-chip technologies to deliver maximum application performance on Intel® processors. Intel® Software Development Products for Linux are compatible with industry-leading development environments and are backed by Intel® Premier Support to keep you developing with confidence. Visit us at www.intel.com.

Announced at guadec.org…

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Two more sponsors have been confirmed, both very involved in GTK+ and FOSS development. They are OpenedHand and Imendio, both sponsoring at silver level. Many thanks to them both for their continued support of GUADEC!

OpenedHand

OpenedHand Limited creates, adapts and improves Unix and Linux based open source software for consumer facing mobile and embedded devices. OpenedHand’s expertise has been utilised by some of the worlds leading device manufacturers to help develop high-quality cutting edge products. As well as providing client services, OpenedHand develops unique free software in-house and contributes to numerous FOSS communities including X.org, Freedesktop.org, the Linux kernel, OpenEmbedded, GNOME and GTK.

Imendio

Imendio is a small European company with a core of expert developer profiles. One of their strongest competencies is in the GTK+ libraries, which is a graphics library collection that can be used on Windows, MacOSX and Linux. Imendio provides hacking skills refined and enhanced by a long running involvement in the open software development sector. Over the years a skill base unmatched by the competition has attracted large customers. Imendio has also a strong involvement in the GNOME community and Foundation.

This bug has been sitting in bugzilla for a while (read: nearly four years). Does anyone have any ideas on a better preview for the theme manager? I’m really looking for any artists to have a go at something that is simple but effective. Ideally it would display font sizes, several controls, the window border, some icons and the background image. It’s obviously not easy to fit all this information into a small preview without it looking cluttered or ugly!

Just announced on guadec.org…

Each year, GUADEC is always supported by the GNOME Foundation, and organised by volunteers. However, this event would be inconceivable without the generous help and contributions from sponsors, media partners and co-organizers. Therefore, the GUADEC team is pleased to announce that Google and Igalia are the first confirmed sponsors for GUADEC 2007! We have several more sponsors in the pipeline, but congratulations to the Google and Igalia for their promptness. We are very grateful to have these companies involved in GUADEC this year, as they are both very focused on using, supporting and providing Free and Open Source software solutions.

Google

Google have decided to sponsor GUADEC at silver level for the second year running. This indicates their continuing commitment and support of Open and Free Software projects.

About Google

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

As a first step to fulfilling that mission, Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a new approach to online search that took root in a Stanford University dorm room and quickly spread to information seekers around the globe. Google is now widely recognized as the world’s largest search engine — an easy-to-use free service that usually returns relevant results in a fraction of a second.

Google provides support to the open source community through donations, hosting community meetups and through the Google Summer of Code program. To learn more about Google’s open source efforts, visit code.google.com.

Igalia

It is also Igalia’s second year sponsoring GUADEC, and they will be sponsoring at Silver level again. Many thanks to Igalia for their continued sponsorship of GUADEC, and also for the many other Free and Open Source projects and events they support.

About Igalia

Igalia is a company from the south-west of Europe (Galicia, Spain), specialized in the development of innovative free software technologies and solutions. Igalia has been increasing its involvement in the Gnome community since its creation five years ago, contributing with code and documentation to several components and applications, and sponsoring and organizing different Gnome events, from local hackfests to international conferences.

In May 2003, the first version of the Fisterra project was published by Igalia. Fisterra is a sophisticated framework for making the development of business management software easier with Gnome technologies. Since then, several companies have adopted solutions based on Fisterra. Igalia developers have a deep knowledge of the Gnome technologies and during the last years, the company has carried out projects for evolving, adapting or modifying different parts of Gnome, including subcontracts for relevant international companies.

http://www.igalia.com/

If so, there is an event page set up for Guadec Let people know you’re going, and tell your friends!

I have found my first suprise feature of GNOME 2.18! I guess this will prevent me having to explain why people have found they have no space left on their removable drives, yet have deleted everything off them…

That is, as long as they can understand what it’s really asking. I’m hoping “umount” and the strange paragraph size is just a translation problem. The odd thing was it didn’t actually empty my wastebasket anyway, since there is still stuff in there from my hard drive.

On the other hand, I can’t wait to see what this will look like in Ubuntu, where they have inexplicably renamed “Wastebasket” to the more incomprehensible “Deleted Items”. (“So I’m deleting the items from my deleted items? You What?”)

Yesterday was my first experience of an Advisory Board conference call, and it was delightfully uneventful. However, I did think it was a shame no one mentioned THE MOST IMPORTANT THING that happened recently, which was the release of GNOME 2.18. I was going to, but we ran out of time before AOB.

Bit disappointed to learn one or two people weren’t taking the call as seriously as they might[1], as there are a lot of possible positives that could come out of these meetings if we could turn words into actions. Collaboration between some of the major GNOME companies is something I’ve been thinking is desperately needed to rejuvenate some areas of the GNOME project.

[1] Some people have asked what I meant by this, so I’ll just clarify it was a few comments being made on IRC at the time of the call. Nothing very serious, but just a little disappointing after such a useful and positive call.

So some people may have noticed I’ve spent more time hacking on control center and other things recently. I’ve had loads of ideas for art.gnome.org, but no time to implement them, so let me introduce the Summer of Code project for art.gnome.org!

Coding the next version of art.gnome.org

Benefits: Users love cool artwork – users love web2.0 – lets combine the two

Requirements: Need to know PHP and MySQL.

More Information here: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeArt/Ago3/Ideas