Monthly Archives: April 2013

Brno GUADEC Call for Papers!

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I would like to give everyone a friendly reminder that Saturday the 27th of April is the official deadline for the GUADEC 2013 Call for Papers. So make sure to get your proposal submitted.

We hope to have a wide range of talks this year, including talks on related subjects such as Wayland and Multimedia, so don’t automatically assume that you will not get a talk approved because its not ‘pure GNOME’.

GUADEC this year will be in Brno in the Czech Republic, so I hope to see as many of you as possible here.

No GStreamer in this years Google Summer of Code

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Some sad news, GStreamer did not get accepted to the 2013 Google Summer of Code. We don’t know the exact reasons, but all we can do at this point is redouble our efforts to get accepted again next year.

In the meantime not all hope is lost. You can still do a Google Summer of Code involving GStreamer with some of the other organisations that did get approved. For instance if you have an idea for a great multimedia desktop application using GStreamer you can try submitting that to for instance GNOME or KDE depending on your UI toolkit of choice as one example. In the past GNOME has also been open to hosting some pure GStreamer projects so you can always try submitting such too. In general I recommend people to take a look at the list of accepted organisations and see if there are projects which technologies would be relevant to the GSoC project you want to do and the apply with them. Also remember you can submit the same project to multiple organisations if it fits multiple projects.

Also the PiTiVi video editor did get approved so I strongly encourage you to take a look at their wonderful ideas page and submit a proposal to do a PiTiVi project.

Open Source software and crowdsourcing

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So thanks to crowd sourcing we are getting a lot of linux games coming out, titles such as Double Fine Adventure, Wasteland 2, Spaceventure, Project Eternity, Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, Godus, Torment: Tides of Numenera,Arcade Racer and a lot more are all coming to the Linux platform thanks to crowdsourcing.

The question that one would want to answer is if crowd sourcing can work for open source projects creating useful software or other kind of tools. One project I am really hoping gets funded currently is Geary, the open source email client from the great guys at Yorba. Not that I personally are desperate for a new email client, I am a happy user of the Evolution email client, but I also know that email is a very personal thing for many people and an area where having different client offering different experiences might make a difference. Also proving that a non-profit outfit like Yorba can fund themselves through crowdsourcing is an important thing to demonstrate. So I have already pledged to Geary and I hope you will too.

They are not the only such project out there of course. Another project I have pledged to is the Phantom Open Emoji project which wants to create a full set of liberally licensed emoji/smileys covering the Unicode 6.0 set of over 800 such things. They only need to reach 25,000 USD in funding to create the full set, so I hope they can make that goal and we can then include support for these in Empathy.

The final project I want to mention is the OpenShot kickstarter. While I do think the best solution would be a GStreamer based one like PiTiVi for various reasons I am still happy that this kickstarter has reached is minimum funding goal already as it is does show success at funding open source development projects.

That said what strikes me is that the 3 open source projects above are all actually quite cheap, in the sense that the funding amounts they ask for are not high at all. And when you consider that games such as Torment reach 4 million USD in crowd sourcing funding one could wish that people would be a bit more prepared to bankroll open source projects. That said I guess just like games had their breakthrough moment with the Double Fine Adventure kickstarter, maybe open source development needs its own shinning star to lead the way. So if you haven’t already please pledge to one or more of the open source efforts above.

There will be more attempts of exploring this space though I am sure, I am even planning to be involved in one such effort myself, but more details on that later.