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
- [Video] Leaving Microsoft Behind for the Sake of National Security
- Threats to "National Security" aren't some users with an Android phone but Microsoft at the root of things
-
- Microsoft Layoffs and Closures Now Reported in Africa
- Microsoft Uninstalls Nigeria as it closes African Development Centre (ADC) in Lagos
- Links 08/05/2024: Android Malware and "AI" Hype
- Links for the day
- [Meme] Technical Committee With People Who Are Not Technical
- the computing/computer industry being occupied by people who lack suitable background
- The Demise of Computer Science Education
- Education is essential for the future; without it, whole nations will perish
- [Video] Prisons for the Minds and for Tech Workers
- Today's video talks about what happens to workforces (across disciplines) in recent years
- [Meme] Struggling to Leave Its Nazi Past Behind
- digital arson
- Microsoft Declines to Talk About How Many People It Has Just Laid Off
- Hours ago in IGN: "Microsoft did not say how many staff will lose their jobs, but significant layoffs are inevitable. IGN has asked Bethesda for comment. Microsoft declined to expand further when contacted by IGN."
- Microsoft Windows in South America: From 99% to 87%
- the latest from statCounter
- It's Rather Obvious Why They Try to Silence Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, and Daniel Pocock
- Some of them already sent physically menacing messages to Daniel Pocock
- IRC Network of Techrights Turns 3 (or 16 if We Count the Freenode Days)
- In a few months IRC turns 36
- Sedating Oneself (and Shareholders) With Fuzzy Buzzwords and Pointless Acquisitions
- IBM trying to buy time
- Clickfraud Spamnil Ran Out of Clickfraud Budget, Apparently
- sooner or later charlatans and frauds run out of steam
- Techrights Gets Under the Skin of Bad, Corrupt, Immoral People (That's a Good Thing)
- Journalism is the lifeblood of democracy and free societies
- Companies Do Not Shut Down Offices and Lay Off Staff en Masse (Morale and Reputation Issue) Unless They're in Deep Financial Trouble
- Microsoft has been faking its financial performance for years
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, May 07, 2024
- IRC logs for Tuesday, May 07, 2024
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- GNU/Linux and ChromeOS Now at 6% in France, According to statCounter
- numbers from statCounter
- Gemini Links 07/05/2024: Music Spotlight and Network Knobs
- Links for the day
- Only Weeks After Microsoft Closed Offices and Studios It is Closing Several More (Many Layoffs, Still Deeply Debt-Saddled)
- When the sad news writes itself
- Bolivarian Republic Of Venezuela: GNU/Linux Reaches 9% (ChromeOS Included)
- Venezuela must have lost interest in some American proprietary software when users were locked out of their own data (Adobe) and the costs could no longer be justified
- [Video] Microsoft is Like Big Oil, Big Tobacco, and Other Perpetrators of Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering
- openwashing, Microsoft lobbying, and Microsoft subsidies (e.g. bailouts in the form of 'defence' contracts)
- Security & Debian: Urgent: New Feed URLs after another WIPO censorship
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- World Press Freedom Day: WIPO censors Debian suicide cluster
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Gemini Links 07/05/2024: Smashing Windows (Moving to GNU/Linux) and Mastodon Time-wasting
- Links for the day
- Links 07/05/2024: Pulitzer for Supreme Court Expose, New Threats to Media Reported
- Links for the day
- Links 07/05/2024: Cheap EVs and Cloudflare Layoffs
- Links for the day
- Berlin police declined to investigate FSFE Nazi comparisons
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- [Meme] Communities Governed by Parasitic Elements and Girlfriends (Who Can't Understand Those Communities)
- Karen Sandler and Molly de Blanc present at DebConf18
- [Meme] You Can't Kill an Idea (or Facts)
- Thankfully, in Western societies, there's still due process, rule of law etc. You don't just hire assassins or imprison critics
- [Meme] Software in the Public Interest (SPI), Inc, Values Articles of Daniel Pocock at ~$5,000 Each (and Fails to Hide the Facts)
- we are laughing, not grieving
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, May 06, 2024
- IRC logs for Monday, May 06, 2024
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- [Meme] About 2,564 Internet Sites Now at Risk of Hostile Takeover by Microsoft-Sponsored Software in the Public Interest (SPI)
- WIPO censors Debian suicide cluster
- Links 07/05/2024: Burning Plastic Waste, Facebook Censoring Politicians
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 07/05/2024: Smashing Windows (Microsoft Losing Users to GNU/Linux), Sixty Years of BASIC
- Links for the day
- Southern Asia is All Android (Majority) Now
- It's looking better (almost) every month
- Windows Already Down to 1% "Market Share" in Some Countries
- it is a dying breed
- Tesla Has Become a Ponzi Scheme or a 'Meme Stock'
- They tell us Tesla is "worth" almost twice as much as a company that sold about 30 times more cars
- For People at Red Hat "Job is at Risk"
- Red Hat is consulting some notorious firms to implement cuts
- Linux.com Became Mostly Dead, de Facto Marketing Site of "Linux" Foundation Products (Unrelated to Linux)
- what has happened to the authoritative domain Linux.com
- Microsoft GitHub: A Hair Salon Where You Get Awards for Nothing (NFT Vanity)
- People aren't defined by some private (proprietary) database and Microsoft does not universally "score" developers
- In Europe, Android is Bigger Than Windows (Android Now Measured at 45.1% Worldwide)
- Right now in statCounter...
- Links 06/05/2024: Al Jazeera Raided, Wildfire Season Coming
- Links for the day
- On Character Assassination Tactics
- The people who leverage these dirty politics typically champion projection tactics
- Links 06/05/2024: Scams and Politics
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 06/05/2024: Reading and Computers
- Links for the day
- United States Entering the $100 Trillion Debt Trap, We Compare GAFAM Debt
- Google's debt is about 6 times less than Amazon's
- GitLab's Losses Grew From $172,311,000 to $424,174,000 Per Annum
- Letting this company have control over your (or your company's) development/code forge may cost you a lot in the future
- statCounter's Latest: Android Bouncing to New All-Time Highs, Windows Down to Unprecedented Lows
- Android rising
- Can't Bear the Thought We're Happy and Productive
- If someone is now harassing online friends, attacking the wife, attacking my family (not just attacking and defaming people I know online) there are legal ramifications
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, May 05, 2024
- IRC logs for Sunday, May 05, 2024
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- Erinn Clark & Debian: Justice or another Open Source vendetta?
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work