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
- Microsoft XBox Layoffs: Almost 2,000 Layoffs Became "Over 2,000"? (Over 20% of the Staff)
- over 20% of staff will be let go, not counting staff that leaves voluntarily
- Summer Plans in Techrights and Elsewhere
- massive layoffs at Microsoft
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- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, June 30, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, June 30, 2025
- People at the Very Top of Microsoft Know How Bad Things Really Are
- There's no product that can replace the former profitability of Windows licensing and stuff that went on top of Windows
- Gemini Links 01/07/2025: Mid Year and a Tour of Old Languages
- Links for the day
- EPO Presentation Bemoans Misuse of Slop in Decision-Making on Patents and in Classification (Which is Likely Illegal Too)
- We habitually mention failed use cases of LLMs on the Web
- Mass Layoffs at Microsoft Confirmed, "XBox Hardware Is Dead"
- It's possible that over 20% of the staff will be laid off
- Links 30/06/2025: Kyrgyzstan vs Media Freedom, Dalai Lama Succession
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 30/06/2025: Backend Programs in Gemini and Dynamic Content Without The Scripting
- Links for the day
- Links 30/06/2025: Zuckerberg’s Tax-Evading Scheme Harms Kids, US Copyright Office Lacks Leadership
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Isn't Laying Off Tens of Thousands to 'Invest' in Slop ('Hey Hi'), It's Laying Off Tens of Thousands Because It's Running Out of Money (and Willing Lenders)
- the layoffs are a sign of the business failing, not "hey hi" (whatever that is) replacing staff
- Intel Lays Off 20% of Its Workforce, Microsoft is Doing the Same This Year
- Like a yoyo, whatever goes up will come back down
- GNU/Linux Rises to New Highs in Angola, Africa in General is Abandoning Windows
- Western media barely covers Microsoft layoffs in Africa, but in recent years Microsoft culled the workforce and even shut down entire operations
- Destination Geminispace (in the Age of LLM Slop and Slop Images That Infest the Web and Social Control Media)
- Geminispace isn't vast, but at least it is - on average - a lot "cleaner"
- GNU/Linux Growing in Sierra Leone This Year
- Based on what statCounter is seeing, this year there are more and more people there who adopt GNU/Linux
- Serial Sloppers Gonna Slop
- More sites out there ought to call out the cheaters
- Quartz (qz.com) is Spam and a Slopfarm
- It used to be OK. Then they fired the staff.
- Links 30/06/2025: US Economic Woes, Extreme Heat
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 29, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, June 29, 2025
- Gemini Links 30/06/2025: "The AI Hype" and New AuraGem Ask
- Links for the day
- Our Desktops Are Not Your Experiments, X is Not an Experiment
- Breaking what already worked
- Microsoft's Big Lies Regarding This Week's Mass Layoffs Have Already Begun (and They're Already Being Spread by Slopfarms)
- Microsoft is the "market leader" in slop
- Explaining the Full Story of SLAPPs From Microsoft Staff
- For every action there is a reaction, for every attack there will be proportionate consequences
- The Openwashing Shills Initiative (OSI) - Part III: IRS and Status of OSI
- "They lied to the US IRS and there’s a paper trail"
- IBM Red Hat's Dogmatic Fanaticism Under a Thin Veil of "Modernism"
- IBM now has the audacity to paint people who don't agree as "nazis"
- Microsoft's Share in Guatemala Fell From 97% to 14%
- Eventually Microsoft will get stuck in a loop of layoffs, layoffs, and more layoffs
- They Made Technology Scary and Taught Us That It's Innocent, Friendly, Even "Social"
- Rejection of all this "apps" and "gadgets" and "Smart" (whatever that means!) status quo isn't a rejection of society
- The Media is Under Attacks Partly Because There's Little Other (Remaining) Press to Speak in Its Defence
- The biggest danger here is that when there's very little press or no "opposition media" left it becomes even easier to crush critics because there aren't many people left to speak about the matter
- If Your Web Site is Run by Bots, Eventually Nobody Will 'Read' It Except Bots (People Don't Want to Read Slop)
- Eventually people learn from mistakes
- Links 29/06/2025: Microsoft Releases False/Fake Benchmarks, "Google Wants You to Watch Ads or Take Surveys to Read Articles"
- Links for the day
- Links 29/06/2025: Data Breaches and Online Censorship
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 29/06/2025: "The Price Of Eggs" and Gemini 3D Tic Tac Toe
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 28, 2025
- IRC logs for Saturday, June 28, 2025