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
-
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
-
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.
-
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
- "Bad Shim Signature"; So 'Secure' That It Overrides Users' Preferences and Turns Itself Back on (Coercive Measure)
- This was a few hours ago
- We Covered UEFI 'Secure Boot' Scandals. The World Listened.
- To hell with UEFI 'secure boot'
- Fake News With Fake Numbers About Microsoft
- "This is what happens when the world's economy is governed by sick old men"
- Slopwatch: "Google News" is Fast Becoming a Mashup of Slopfarms, Linux Journal ("LJ") is a Dump of LLM Slop
- Well done, Google News. Google itself can flourish as a slopfarm mashup.
- Torturing Users Who Just Want to Run GNU/Linux on Their Own PC
- "Linux does not want to install"
- European Authorities, Already Bribed and Infiltrated by Microsoft, Won't Help You Find BigBlueButton, Jami, Ring, and Jitsi
- Because they're paid by Microsoft and are Microsoft 'addicts' themselves
- Moving From Content Management Systems (CMSs) to Static Site Generators (SSGs) Saves You Time, Makes You a Lot More Productive
- try to reduce the cost (financial and computational) of running your site
- Leak: European Patent Office (EPO) is Now Attacking Amicale Clubs
- corruption has become the norm and scientists are robbed of any dignity
- Oracle Fraud (or Defrauding Shareholders)
- "the obvious [lie] is that watts are (wasted) electricity [and] and FLOPS are computing capacity"
-
- Links 14/09/2025: US "Economy Sagging", "Michigan Economy Wobbles From Tariffs"
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 14/09/2025: Minimalist Snippet Manager and Omarchy Linux
- Links for the day
- The Face of the Digital Far Right: Microsoft Lunduke
- Microsoft Lunduke is an online extremist that belongs to and panders to the far right
- 20 Years Later and Academia Isn't the Same
- "I never dreamed of being a professor"
- 'Cancel Culture' by the Right: Microsoft Lunduke Contacts People's Employers Trying to Get Them Fired
- Microsoft Lunduke panders to extremists online
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, September 13, 2025
- IRC logs for Saturday, September 13, 2025
- Microsoft is Rapidly Dropped From Web Servers, Shows Survey
- Microsoft lost about 8% "market share" in just 3 months
- Many GNU/Linux Users Report MOK (Machine Owner Key) Issues in Recent Days
- many people don't report this online and never post in Reddit
- Links 13/09/2025: Escalations in East Europe and POTUS’ Health Cover-Up
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 13/09/2025: Lagrange Turns 5 and Lagrange 1.19.2 Released
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Inside Your Linux: "Security vulnerability that allowed an attacker to bypass UEFI Secure Boot."
- 2 hours ago
- A New Low for "Linux Journal": Promoting MICROSOFT WINDOWS Using LLM Slop
- They've just jumped the shark entirely
- The Register MS Still Takes Money to Hype Up "AI" in Articles by Microsoft Resellers With the Term "AI" 30+ Times in Them
- Notice how many times they mention "AI"
- The Apache Logo News is VERY Old, Racists and 'Anti-Woke' Bigots Look for Something to Incite Other Bigots With
- Nothing to see here, move along
- Linux Mint 9/11: "4th One Today..." (in Reddit)
- Remember that not everyone having an issue reports it to social control media like Reddit
- Nepal Will Fall Without a Single Shot Fired, Thanks to Social Control Media
- Or very few shots (by the authorities)
- European Corruption in the European Patent Office (EPO) Targets Culture
- "In reality, the project includes a new “legal instrument” shifting administrative burden and liability on EPO staff while creating new uncertainty and externalising Amicale activities."
- UEFI Secure Boot Failing, as Expected for Nearly 15 Years Already (Techrights Said This Since 2012)
- in the media
- Debian 9/11
- people report this issue
- Gemini and Web Links 13/09/2025: MElon's Slop Grift and "Autonomous Trains"
- Links for the day
- Pursuing Peace Through Violence
- You cannot "see" a person's mind, until the mouth opens
- Can We Please Stop Celebrating Shooters?
- "An important point to hammer on is that CoCs were never intended for uniform or symmetric application"
- Geminispace is Growing Faster in 2025 Than It Did in 2024
- What matters is that corporations haven't ruined it and LLM slop is extremely rare
- Links 13/09/2025: China Punishes for 'Negative' Posts, US Police Unable to Find Shooter
- Links for the day
- Who's the Mystery Financier of SLAPP Against Techrights and Is That a Millionaire/Billionaire?
- Whose idea was it to fund meritless lawsuits against my wife and I?
- Slopwatch: Slow Slop Day
- This distracts from or may take traffic away from the original articles, actually written by actual people
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, September 12, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, September 12, 2025
- CoC Gone Wrong: Celebrating Murder OK, Complaining About the Celebration Gets You Banned
- Hopefully the NixOS Foundation will have a word with (maybe replace) the moderator/s
- Gemini Links 12/09/2025: Familiarity and Secondary Dominants
- Links for the day
- Explaining (in Length and Depth) the Damage Matthew Garrett Did to Linux and to GNU/Linux Users
- no matter how many threats we receive
- Links 12/09/2025: "Bad Reviews" as Extortion Weapon, "Free Speech At Risk in America’s Schools" According to ACLU
- Links for the day
- Only One Speaker Does Not Do Sharecropping for MElon (in X.com)
- The man who puts principles before PR/optics
- The Mind of the 'Hulk Hogan of UEFI'
- in a nutshell
- A Day After "UEFI 9/11": UEFI Secure Boot Bypass
- In the news today (right now), as published in the past few hours
- Links 12/09/2025: Slop Code as Liability, Microsoft Outlook Down for Many
- Links for the day
- It's Still Not to Late to Turn Off "Secure Boot"
- If people reboot their PC or server today, and it relies on "Secure Boot" on Sept. 12 or later, then depending on the firmware there may be trouble ahead
- Links 12/09/2025: Shira Perlmutter is Back, “Software Per Se” Patent Rejections in In re McFadden
- Links for the day
- Slopwatch: Linux Plagiarism, Slopfarms Still Infesting Google News, Many Images Are Fake
- Google is promoting plagiarism
- "This Morning Might Turn Out to be an Interesting One for System Admins Who Haven't Updated Their Devices' Secure Boot Certificate" (If They Reboot)
- Who asked for this anyway?
- Gemini Links 12/09/2025: Metric System, Dumping Windows, and Software Architecture is Dead
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, September 11, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, September 11, 2025