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
- Microsoft Bankruptcy
- "Microsoft unit in Russia to file for bankruptcy, database shows"
- Techrights Does Not Compete With LLM Slop, It Exposes the Bastards, Plagiarists and Scammers Who Do That
- People like Scam Altman, still facing a lawsuit from his own sister for sexual abuse against her
-
- Links 01/06/2025: Windows TCO, Openwashing, "It's FOSS" Still Promoting Microsoft
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 01/06/2025: Simplification and Networks Everywhere
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, May 31, 2025
- IRC logs for Saturday, May 31, 2025
- Google Bribes EFF. EFF Promotes LLM Slop as 'Fair Use'. To GAFAM It's a Low-Cost Lobby Hedge.
- So the bribes pay off ("slush fund") and the word spreads
- Slopwatch: Fake Text and Images, Financial Bubbles, and Scams in "Intelligent" Clothing
- Sometimes what they mean by "AI" is just cheap labour somewhere else, as we discussed in IRC a few hours ago
- Why Microsoft is Collapsing (Similar to What's Happening at IBM), As Insiders See It
- IBM seems like one heck of a mess
- Reliable Computing Means Free (Libre) Computing
- Sites that want to promote security ought to deal with the biggest issues
- Links 31/05/2025: US Court Orders Sides With RFE/RL, War Updates From Ukraine
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 31/05/2025: ARM Server and power_supply Subsystem
- Links for the day
- Links 31/05/2025: Slop Stigmatised as Disinformation, Catalyst/Driver of "Death of Communication"
- Links for the day
- Common Sense 101: Do Not Write Blog Posts Saying You Want to Murder Colleagues (or Yourself)
- Only crazy people would think stabbings are a joke
- Links 31/05/2025: Microsoft-Connected Builder.ai is a Fraud and US is Purging Students Based on Race/Nationality
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 30/05/2025: Limmat, Doomscrollers, and Arguments Parsing
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, May 30, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, May 30, 2025
- The "AI" (Slop) Bubble Already Popped, But It's Not an Overnight Collapse
- where Microsoft put its money
- No More Steven Astorino at IBM, Chatter About Weekly/Nonstop Layoffs at IBM
- What happened? Good luck guessing.
- Looking at Corruption in Europe, Going Beyond the EPO
- Expect a new series to kick off very soon
- Slopwatch: Security SPAM and LLM Slop for SEO and FUD Purposes, Perpetually Tarnishing the Perception of Linux and (Open)SSH Security
- A lot of this Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD) comes from Microsoft and its LLMs
- Links 30/05/2025: Google's LLM Slop Pushers Are Killing Journalism and Shira Perlmutter Fails to Stop Bribed Regime From Legalising Plagiarism (in "AI" Clothing)
- Links for the day
- Links 30/05/2025: Offline Arts and "Threshold of Patience"
- Links for the day
- Signing Off Serious Lies With a Statement of Truth is No Joking Matter
- It's not hard to see what's happening here
- Links 30/05/2025: LLM Slop Already Ingests and Vomits Its Own Garbage, Facebook Exec Admits Copyrights a Concern Too
- Links for the day
- Mass Layoffs at Microsoft Result in More Whistleblowers From Microsoft
- Microsoft's predatory pricing is further
- Slopwatch: Planet Ubuntu Became LLM Slop and Some People Fail to See the Immorality of Plagiarism
- it lessens the incentive for people to publish real articles
- EPO Poll: 68% Dissatisfied With Quality of Slop (Wrongly Framed as "AI") for Patent Classification
- Slop does not work, it's just falsely advertised with extra hype (funded by slop pushers that sponsor the major media)
- Big Crowds Gather to Learn About Software Freedom From the Man Who Started GNU/Linux in 1983
- "It was a great success"
- Microsoft Layoffs Again in Bay Area
- Microsoft relies on people's false belief that being "in LinkedIn" will get you a job; well, seems like even working inside LinkedIn really sucks and you lose the job
- Gemini Links 30/05/2025: Fighting Against the Bad News, and Slop is Dehumanisation Disguised as "Intelligence"
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, May 29, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, May 29, 2025