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
- The FSF Board and FSF Beard
- So the FSF's Board has grown
- Law Firms Facing the Consequences for Patently Abusive Litigation on Behalf of Microsoft Employees Who Got Arrested for Strangulation and Had Done Even Worse Things
- Having spent 1.5 years bullying me with patronising letters on behalf of Microsofters, last week they got served a massive bill and, in effect, lost the Hearing
- LLMs Breaking Everything
- Computing and the Net became a playground for scammers and "bros", like people who "invented" fake currencies and also try to tell us that LLMs spewing out things will have some real value
-
- Links 22/06/2025: Windows TCO Tales and YouTube Getting More Hostile to Users
- Links for the day
- New Report From the EPO's Staff Representatives in The Hague (LSCTH) Reveals Many Unsolved Issues
- Local Staff Committee The Hague (LSCTH) wrote to staff just before the weekend
- Links 22/06/2025: More Slop Lawsuits (Copyrights) and "America’s Oligarch Problem"
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 22/06/2025: Gigantic Toolchest and Annoying Bots
- Links for the day
- The Calling
- Persist and persevere, justice will come your way
- So Far Every BetaNews 'Article' is LLM Slop, So BetaNews is Officially Just a Slopfarm
- They just don't seem to value what they have
- IBM Rumour: Mass Layoffs (RAs) Lists Being Made for Consulting, With Effect in July 2025
- Bogus companies with no viable products and no world-leading (in their field) staff are doomed to perish
- Links 21/06/2025: Data Breach With 16 Billion Passwords, Dutch Government Recommends Children Under 15 Stay off TikTok and Instagram
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 21/06/2025: Notes about Typst (and LaTeX) and Opos
- Links for the day
- Microsoft's Competition Tactics: Sabotage GNU/Linux Installs, Block Chrome
- Edge is dying
- 1989: Free Software as "Open" Software (OSI Didn't Coin "Open Source", It Also Predates Linux)
- "One man's fight for Free software"
- The Microsoft OOXML Modus Operandi: Throw 1,000 Pages of Other People's Work for a Judge to Read Ahead of a One-Hour Meeting
- No time to discuss this - that's the point
- Formalities Officers (FOs) at the EPO Are in Trouble, Reveals Internal Report
- We already know, based on an HR pattern we saw at IBM and elsewhere, that reallocating roles can be prerequisite for dismissal and those who do so expect many to resign anyway
- The Web is Slop and FUD, Let's Go to Gemini Protocol
- Lupa sees self-signed capsules at 92.4%
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 20, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, June 20, 2025
- Links 21/06/2025: Phone Bans for Concerts, Tensions in Taiwan Strait
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 21/06/2025: Spoilers, Public Yggdrasil Node, Changes to AuraGem Search
- Links for the day
- "Six years of Gemini!"
- From gemini://geminiprotocol.net
- Gemini Links 20/06/2025: Summer Updates and Hardware Failures
- Links for the day
- Links 20/06/2025: Google Shareholder Sues Google and Google Sued for Defamatory Slop ('Hey Hi') Word Salads ('Summaries')
- Links for the day
- Linux Journal Might Have Become the Latest Slopfarm Targeting "Linux", the Trends Are Concerning for Dying News Sites
- They tarnish the Web with junk and then die
- On "Learning to Code"
- quality may suffer, plus things get bloated
- Quick Points Regarding This Week's Court Hearing
- it paves the way for us to squash all the SLAPPs from Microsofters
- Common Mistake: Believing Social Control Media Will Document Your Writings/Thoughts and Search Engines Like Google Will Help You Find These
- Many news sites wrongly assumed that posting directly to Twitter would be acceptable
- The Manchester Bees and This Hot Summer
- We have had a fantastic week so far this week
- Gemini Protocol Enters Its Seventh Year, Growth Has Accelerated!
- Maybe in June 20 2026 there will be over 3,500 active capsules?
- Mastodon and the Fediverse Have an Issue: Liability for Content (Even in Other Instances) and Costs
- self-hosting is the only logical path forward
- Why Microsoft and Its 'Hey Hi' (Slop) Frenzy Fail While Sinking in Deep, Growing Debt
- Right now, like Twitter around the time it was sold to MElon, "open" "hey hi" is a big pile of debt with a lot to pay for that debt (interest payments)
- Europe is Leaving Microsoft, the Press Coverage Isn't Sufficiently Helpful
- The news is generally positive, but the press coverage leaves so much to be desired
- Slopwatch: Linuxsecurity, BetaNews, and Linux Journal
- slippery slope
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, June 19, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, June 19, 2025
- Gemini Links 20/06/2025: Gemini Protocol Turns 6!
- Links for the day