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
- Slop Nihilism is Funded by Big Oil
- Eventually human civilisation will destroy itself
- Professor Eben Moglen Recovering From Open Heart Surgery
- From his public pages (this is not secret)
- There Are Red Hat (IBM) Layoffs, But Google News is Infested With Slopfarms
- It contributes a lot to misinformation and it encourages plagiarism
- USA Not a Place for Free Speech
- In America, as in the US, the attacks seem more enhanced or advanced these days
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- Links 17/09/2025: Long COVID Study, "Exposing Pegasus", and Chatbots Exposing Sensitive Data
- Links for the day
- Links 17/09/2025: Secret Settlement for Internet Archive and Google’s LLM Slop Summaries Attracting Lawsuits
- Links for the day
- The True Cost of 'Generative Models'
- Funded and promoted by the companies that profit from the waste
- 'Big Slop' Attacks Contemporary Information/Knowledge and Creative Works, 'Big Copyright' (Cartel) Attacks the Old
- Someone at IA will hopefully "blow the whistle" on what they actually agreed
- Why We Find It Difficult to Trust Rust
- A comparison between C/C++ and Rust
- Watching the OSI: Our Series Will Carry on Irrespective of the Chief's 'Resignation'
- the OSI isn't even the real guardian of the term "Open Source"
- Just What LibreOffice Needs? Another Language? (Rust)
- what's all this concern about memory safety?
- Many Microsoft Managers Are Leaving
- "Hey hi" chaff or chaff about "hey hi" cannot eternally distract from the difficulties inside the company
- Tomorrow, Microsoft's Tim Anderson's 'The Register MS' Offshoot Will Have Been Inactive for 2 Months (There's Also a Slop Problem)
- We've already caught The Register MS using LLM slop for articles
- Microsoft's Chief Legal Officer Leaves Microsoft After Nearly 30 Years
- And not retiring
- Even Windows Users Are Having Problems With "Secure Boot"
- When it comes to security - Microsoft strives for the very opposite
- Another Competition Crime of Microsoft, Long Facilitated and Advocated by a Bad Actor, Who is Funded by a Third Party to Commit Extortion Against People Who Have Correctly and Repeatedly Warned About It for Over 13 Year
- We must always go back to the core issues
- 3 More Reasons to Replace Mozilla Firefox With LibreWolf
- Thankfully there are de-enshittified versions of Firefox
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, September 16, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, September 16, 2025
- Links 17/09/2025: Google Layoffs in "Hey Hi" (AI), Perplexity Hit With More "Hey Hi" (Plagiarism) Lawsuits
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 17/09/2025: Reclaiming Things in a Digital Age and Moon Phases in CGI
- Links for the day
- Slopwatch: Google News is Slop, Google News is Plagiarism, Google News is Dying
- Google is off the rails
- Links 16/09/2025: "The Censorship Alarm Is Ringing in the Wrong Direction" and ASRock Does Microsoft E.E.E. on GNU/Linux
- Links for the day
- Serious "Breach of Confidentiality of Personal Data" in Europe's Second-Largest Institution, the EPO
- Yes, the same EPO that routinely uses "data protection" and "GDPR" as a pretext for hiding or covering up its corruption and white-collar crimes (it even uses that as an excuse for refusing to obey courts' orders)
- Adrienne Rockenhaus Says Her Husband Was Arrested for Running Tor and Denied Basic Rights in the United States
- the US seems to be getting "russified" in its approach towards Tor
- This is What Happens When Microsoft Canonical Lets Decisions on Ubuntu be Made by a Youngster From the British Army (Where He Did Mass Surveillance)
- "Is Ubuntu Compromised?"
- Back Doored Windows Giving GNU/Linux a Hard Time (Under the Guise of 'Security')
- Is this complication intentional? Most likely, yes
- Links 16/09/2025: Science, Security, and Conflicts
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 16/09/2025: Command-line Options in POSIX Shell and Introducing Acre 0.9
- Links for the day
- Microsoft 'Secure' Boot Versus Dual Boot With GNU/Linux
- they're meant to assume everything is OK
- Links 16/09/2025: While Oracle Pretends to be Rich It's Firing About 70 MySQL Workers, "Oracle's Revenge" (Faking Demand With "AI")
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Has Just Published a New Web Page About "Secure Boot Update Process" (Microsoft Also Admits Issues; PCs Can Stop Booting)
- Why was this page issued and published only hours ago?
- Microsoft Lunduke: I Spread Hate and Then I Receive Hate
- Cry us a river, Microsoft Lunduke
- "Use Wayland" Isn't a Bugfix for X (X11 is Still Necessary)
- They tell us X is "dead" and we must all be herded into Wayland ASAP
- "Disable Secure Boot and Fast Boot. Wipe and Start Over."
- At least they didn't say, buy a new computer...
- The Oracle Ponzi Scheme
- Oracle isn't doing well, but it's nowadays fashionable to say "clown" and "hey hi" to prop up one's stock, even based on nothing at all
- The New Head of OSI is an "Hey Hi" (AI) Obsessed Person
- when Bryant says "AI" that doesn't mean AI
- Taking Out the Battery, Opening Up Your Computer, Just Like a "Normie" Would
- At this stage, any person who still says "enable Secure Boot" is misguided or persuaded by companies that sell rootkits
- Slopwatch: Serial Sloppers and Slopfarms Still Infesting Google News (Fake 'Articles' About "Linux" Spreading FUD)
- searching for "Linux" today yields a lot of FUD
- "Governments, local authorities, schools and hospitals can lead by example by procuring only Free Software"
- Crossposted from Tux Machines
- Cindy Cohn Leaving the Electronic Frontier Foundation While Its Co-founder John Gilmore, Whom She Apparently Helped Oust, Will Celebrate 40 Years of the Free Software Foundation, Inc.
- EFF has been busy hoarding GAFAM money, whereas the latter is where all the real activism is done
- The Reach of Techrights Has Broadened
- We nowadays cover a broader range of issues
- "Google is Googlebombing KDE's Project Banana"
- So is Google googlebombing KDE's Project Banana? You decide.
- Complicating Things for No Actual Benefit, Just Added Risk and More Difficulties Adding GNU/Linux and BSDs
- Watch what it's like for people who wish to use BSDs
- Some Very Large IRC Networks Are Growing
- IRC will turn 38 next year
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, September 15, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, September 15, 2025
- Links 16/09/2025: Autumn Party, RPG Planet, and Optical ROOPHLOCH
- Links for the day
- Geminispace Growing at Pace of Over 10% Per Year
- Contrary to what some pessimists try to claim
- Linux Mint Forums Today: Disable 'Secure Boot', It Doesn't Improve Security, It's Just a Microsoft Obstacle to GNU/Linux Users
- They also mention MOK
- What Ruben Amorim and Stefano Maffulli Have in Common
- Censors Wikipedia and Social Control Media
- Microsoft Won't Cooperate in Trying to Tackle EPO Corruption (Microsoft Profits From This Corruption)
- Use something like BigBlueButton, Jami, Ring, and Jitsi instead
- Solved Less Than an Hour Ago: Trying to Escape Windows, 'Secure Boot' Gets in the Way
- 'Secure Boot' wasn't meant to even exist in the first place
- Stefano Maffulli, Executive Director of the Open Source Initiative, Resigns or Gets Removed (We'll Continue Covering OSI Scandals)
- A dozen mentions of "AI", not much about "Open Source"
- Andy Has Just Nailed It (Regarding Complexity and Failure, a la UEFI)
- The users no longer own or control what they buy
- Compatibility Support Module (CSM) Versus GNU/Linux Simplicity
- what Andy recently called "solutionism"
- Links 15/09/2025: "Postal Traffic to US Down by Over 80%" and 'Smart' Spinozacampus Laundry Room Goes AWOL
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 15/09/2025: Dungeon Hustle and Deleting Oneself From the Net
- Links for the day
- Breach of EPO's Duty of Care or Cigna Reimbursement Issues
- This is the sort of thing that motivated Luigi Mangione to assassinate a CEO
- Ask Ubuntu About "Secure Boot" Violation and Laptops That Don't Boot GNU/Linux
- Does anyone still believe that "Secure Boot" has anything at all to do with security?
- We Are Sad to Hear the Story of Jonathan Riddell, Champion of KDE and GNU/Linux on Desktops/Laptops
- I have enormous respect for Jonathan and everything he has done
- Talking About the Problem vs Talking to the Problem
- Wanting an audience is never a good excuse for compromising one's values and principles
- Focusing on Patents
- The reason we cover the EPO so much is that it's close to home
- "Secure Boot Violation": The 'Joys' of Fake Security Gone Wrong
- Not everyone reboots every day
- Links 15/09/2025: Russia Invades Romanian Airspace, Penske Media Sues Google Over LLM Slop
- Links for the day
- Links 15/09/2025: Bitcoin ATMs Scam and "Conservative Cryptography" (Backdoors Fantasies)
- Links for the day
- EPO Imitates Microsoft: "Three Days or More Per Week" Inside the Office to Get a Desk to Work on; "the Office Breaches Its Promise Towards Staff and Acts in Breach of Its Duty of Care"
- The EPO serves no actual function in Europe
- Links 15/09/2025: Political Affairs, Censorship, and Copyrights
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 15/09/2025: Music Genres, Invisible Networks, and Akademy 2025
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, September 14, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, September 14, 2025