GNOME News: Financial Issues, Mutter-Wayland, West Coast Summit, Community Participation
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-04-14 08:19:14 UTC
- Modified: 2014-04-14 08:19:14 UTC
Karen Sandler
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The GNOME Foundation has run into cash flow problems and as a result is freezing non-essential expenses. The GNOME Foundation has eliminated their cash reserves leading to this dire situation, but should be recoverable in the months ahead. The GNOME Foundation got into this situation through its Outreach Program for Women (OPW) and managing the program (and funds) for a number of other participating organizations. The GNOME Foundation staff and board fell behind in their processes with being overwhelmed by administering OPW. GNOME's Outreach Program for Women is explained as "The Outreach Program for Women (OPW) helps women (cis and trans) and genderqueer get involved in free and open source software." They've had around 30 interns for their most recent cycle.
Software Freedom Conservancy has announced that Karen M. Sandler is the Conservancy's new Executive Director. "Bradley M. Kuhn, outgoing Executive Director, gratefully passes the torch to his long-time colleague Karen Sandler. While Kuhn's work as Conservancy's President and on its Board of Directors remain unchanged, Kuhn's new full-time staff role is titled “Distinguished Technologist”."
Software Freedom Conservancy, a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity based in New York, announced today the addition of a talented new member of its management team. Karen M. Sandler, formerly Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, begins today as Conservancy's new Executive Director.
Mutter-Wayland
GNOME's Mutter-Wayland compositor requires EGL/KMS rendering back-end support and this currently isn't supported by software-based drivers that aren't backed by an actual GPU with hardware acceleration. However, developers are working to allow the swrast driver and LLVMpipe to work with this back-end rather than adding any FBdev/Pixman support to Mutter-Wayland. The primary use-case is to get Mutter-Wayland running in virtual machines where there is no accelerated GPU driver with DRM/KMS support (i.e. mainly outside of VMware's VMWgfx world).
Wayland branch is now (yesterday) merged into Mutter master and that also brought some small changes to GNOME Shell, i.e, changes in build, changes on checking when Wayland is the compositor.
Software
The GNOME EasyTAG application is a simple, open-source way for editing audio tags within popular audio file formats. The much-revamped EasyTAG 2.2.0 is now available.
West Coast Summit
This being last day of the hackfest, people started to disappear in the afternoon. Before that, we had a planning session for Wayland in GNOME 3.14, and came up with a number of concrete tasks and goals.
Participation
With 3.12 out the door, it’s time to think about what we want to be doing for 3.14. I have a long list of design projects that I want to work on for the next release, but I also want to spend some time on how the GNOME project is working and how we can improve it.
One of my reoccurring interests is how we, as a project, can ensure that each module is in a healthy state. We want modules to have active developer teams around them, and we want it to be easy for people to get involved – not just because it is good for our software, but also because openness is an important part of our mission.
This interest in helping people to contribute isn’t just reserved for new, inexperienced contributors. There are experienced coders out there who are interested in GNOME but haven’t found a way in. Even members of the GNOME project itself don’t always know how to contribute to different apps and modules.
Misc. GStreamer Developments
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Previously there were a few sinks based on OpenGL (osxvideosink for Mac OS X and eglglessink for Android and iOS), but they all only allowed rendering to a window. They did not allow rendering of a video into a custom texture that is then composited inside the application into an OpenGL scene. And then there was gst-plugins-gl, which allowed more flexible handling of OpenGL inside GStreamer pipelines, including uploading and downloading of video frames to the GPU, provided various filters and base classes to easily implement shader-based filters, provided infrastructure for sharing OpenGL contexts between different elements (even if they run in different threads) and also provided a video sink. The latter was now improved a lot, ported to all the new features for hardware integration and finally merged into gst-plugins-bad. Starting with GStreamer 1.4 in a few weeks, OpenGL will be a first-class citizen in GStreamer pipelines.
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The GStreamer 1.4 release that will happen in a few weeks time is officially making OpenGL a "first class citizen" and can be used by all platforms / operating systems supporting this open-source multimedia framework.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Backlash and Negative Press After Microsoft Tells Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) People to DIE
- Follow-up stories
- Censorship as Signal of Opportunity for Reform
- It remains sad and ironic that Wikileaks outsourced so much of its official communications to Twitter (now X)
- The World Wide Web Has Been Rotting for Years (Quality, Accuracy, and Depth Consistently Decreasing)
- In the past people said that the Web had both "good" and "bad" and that the good outweighed the bad
- Comoros: Windows Plunges to Record Low of About 6% in Country of a Million People (in 2010 Windows Was 100%)
- Many of these people earn a few dollars a day; they don't care for Microsoft's "Hey Hi PC" hype
- The Mail (MX) Server Survey for July 2024 Shows Microsoft Collapsing to Only 689 Servers or 0.17% of the Whole (It Used to be About 25%)
- Microsoft became so insignificant and the most astounding thing is how the media deliberate ignores it or refuses to cover it
- Windows Down From 98.5% to 22.9% in Hungary
- Android is up because more people buy smaller mobile devices than laptops
- Microsoft Windows in Algeria: From 100% to Less Than 15%
- Notice that not too long ago Windows was measured at 100%. Now? Not even 15%.
- Microsoft Windows "Market Share" in New Zealand Plunges to 25%
- Android rising
- SUSE Goes Aryan: You May Not Use the Germanic Brand Anymore (It's Monopolised by the Corporation)
- Worse than grammar Nazis
- Gratis But Not Free as in Freedom: How Let's Encrypt is Dying in Geminispace
- Let's Encrypt is somewhat of a dying breed where the misguided CA model is shunned
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- Red Hat Keeps Behaving Like a Microsoft Reseller (for Proprietary Stuff!), Microsoft Employees as Authors in redhat.com
- In some ways this reminds us of Novell
- UEFI 'Secure Boot' Once Again Bricking PCs and Fake Security Models Are Perishing in Geminispace
- Let's Encrypt has just fallen again
- Links 17/07/2024: New Attacks on the Press, European Patents Squashed Even at Kangaroo Court (UPC)
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 17/07/2024: Proponents of Censorship and New Arrivals at Gemini
- Links for the day
- Links 17/07/2024: School Budget Meltdown and Modern Cars as Tracking Nightmares
- Links for the day
- This Should Certainly be Illegal, But the Person Who Helped Microsoft Do This is Still Attacking the Critics of It
- perhaps time for an "I told you so post"
- [Meme] A Computer With an Extra Key on the Keyboard Isn't Everyone's Priority
- (so your telling me meme)
- Africa as an Important Reminder That Eradicating Microsoft Doesn't Go Far Enough
- Ideally, if our top goal is bigger than "get rid of Microsoft", we need to teach people to choose and use devices that obey them, not GAFAM
- Billions of Computers Run Linux and Many Use Debian (or a Derivative of It)
- many devices never get updated or even communicate with the Net, so exhaustive tallies are infeasible
- [Meme] Microsoft is Firing
- Don't worry, Microsoft will have some new vapourware coming soon
- More DEI (or Similar) Layoffs on the Way, According to Microsoft Team Leader
- What happened shortly before Independence Day wasn't the end of it, apparently
- [Meme] Many Volunteers Now Realise the "Open" in "OpenSUSE" or "openSUSE" Was Labour-Mining
- Back to coding, packaging and testing, slaves
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, July 16, 2024
- IRC logs for Tuesday, July 16, 2024
- [Meme] Ein Factory
- A choice between "masters" (or "master race") is a false choice that results in mass exploitation and ultimately eradication (when there's little left to exploit)
- Links 17/07/2024: Open Source Initiative Lies and Dark Net Thoughts
- Links for the day
- Media Distorting Truth to Promote Ignorance
- online media is rapidly collapsing
- Android Rises to New Highs of Almost 80% in Cameroon
- How many dozens of nations will see Windows at under 10% this coming winter?
- Links 16/07/2024: TikTok Ban in Europe and Yandex Split
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 16/07/2024: On Packrafting and on Trump Shot
- Links for the day
- [Meme] Firefox Users Who Think They Know Better Than Mozilla
- Enjoy Firebook
- Firefox Used to Have About Half the Market in Switzerland, But It Doesn't Stand a Chance Anymore (Chrome Surging This Summer)
- Mozilla has managed to alienate some of the biggest fans of Firefox
- Microsoft's Biggest Losses Are in Europe This Summer
- Microsoft's ability to milk a relatively rich Europe is fast diminishing
- How to Make Software Suck and Discriminate Against People at the Same Time
- ageism glorified
- Bing Was at 2.6% in Russia When LLM Hype Started. Now It's Down to 0.8% (for 3 Months in a Row Already)
- The sharp fall of Bing may mean that exiting the Russian market won't matter to anybody
- [Meme] Microsoft Seems to be Failing to Comply With WARN Act (by Refusing to Announce Mass Layoffs as They Happen)
- since when does Microsoft obey the law anyway?
- Microsoft Layoffs Are Still Too Frequent to Keep Abreast of and Properly (or Exhaustively) Classify
- The "HR" department knows what's happening, but whistleblowers from there are rare
- Bahamas Joined the "5% Windows" Club
- statCounter only traces back about 1 in 20 Web requests to Windows
- Links 16/07/2024: Salesforce Layoffs and Microsoft's DMARC Fail
- Links for the day
- Antenna Abuse and Gemini Abuse (Self-hosting Perils)
- Perhaps all this junk is a sign of Gemini growing up
- Possibly Worse Than Bribes: US Politicians and Lawmakers Who Are Microsoft Shareholders
- They will keep bailing out Microsoft to bail themselves out
- The Software Freedom Conservancy Folks Don't Even Believe in Free Speech and They Act As Imposters (Also in the Trademark Arena/Sense)
- Software Freedom Conservancy was already establishing a reputation for itself as a G(I)AFAM censor/gatekeeper
- Djibouti Enters the Windows "10% Club" (Windows Was 99% in 2010)
- In Africa in general Microsoft lost control
- GNU/Linux Share Doubled in the United States of America (USA) in the Past 12 Months
- Or so says statCounter
- Even in North Korea (Democratic People's Republic Of Korea) Google Said to Dominate, Microsoft Around 1%
- Google at 93.26%
- [Meme] The Red Bait (Embrace... Extinguish)
- They set centos on fire, then offer a (de facto) proprietary substitute for a fee
- Shooting the Messenger to Spite the Message
- segment of a Noam Chomsky talk
- [Video] Boston Area Assange Defense (Yesterday)
- It was published only hours ago
- Guinea: Windows Down From 99.3% to 2.7% 'Market Share'
- Guinea is not a small country
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, July 15, 2024
- IRC logs for Monday, July 15, 2024
- What's Meant by "Antenna Abuse" (Gemini)
- syndication is not a monopoly in Gemini and if one doesn't condone political censorship, then one can create one's own syndication service/capsule
- Microsoft Layoffs and Entire Unit Termination: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
- What an announcement to make just before Independence Day
- Links 16/07/2024: Old Computer Challenge and One Page Dungeon Contest
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Falls Further and Closer Towards 10% (Windows "Market Share") in Kuwait
- more countries entering the "single-digit Windows" (under 10%) club
- Gemini Links 15/07/2024: Antenna's Pro-Hamas Bias Revisited and Old Computer Challenge
- Links for the day
- [Video] Julian Assange, Over One Decade Ago, Cautioning About What the Internet Had Truly Become
- video is not new
- Homage to Malta
- Malta is probably easy for Microsoft to bribe
- IRC at 16
- Logging has been used for us and against us
- In Malta, Android/Linux Has Overtaken Microsoft Windows (According to statCounter)
- statCounter milestone?
- Links 15/07/2024: China’s Economic Problems, Boeing Under Fire
- Links for the day
- 500 Days' Uptime Very Soon
- Good luck doing that with Windows...
- Windows Falls Below 20% in Tunisia
- A month ago we wrote about GNU/Linux in Tunisia
- Links 15/07/2024: Google Wants Wiz and Why "Sports Ruin Everything"
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 15/07/2024: Old Computer Challenge and Sending Files via NNCP
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, July 14, 2024
- IRC logs for Sunday, July 14, 2024