GNOME Annual Report 2007 - GNOME in 2007
Author: SayaminduDasgupta
The year of GNOME's 10th anniversary was full of important happenings: more GNOME-based mobile devices were released, a new Roadmap process was created, the Online Desktop ideas were presented at GUADEC, and more.
2007 saw GNOME based technology showing up in a number of mobile and embedded devices. The beginning of the year saw the release of the GNOME-technology-based Nokia N800 Internet tablet, shortly followed up by the announcement of Neo1973, a mobile phone running the OpenMoko stack, also based on the underlying components of the GNOME platform.
The year also saw the rise in popularity of Vala, a new programming language aimed specifically for GNOME developers. As mentioned in its website, "Vala aims to bring modern programming language features to GNOME developers without imposing any additional runtime requirements and without using a different ABI compared to applications and libraries written in C."
March also saw the release of GNOME 2.18, the end of yet another six months of tireless work by the developers, translators, and documentation people. Apart from the usual small but extremely useful incremental upgrades which accompany all major GNOME releases, this release was accompanied by the introduction of Seahorse into the core desktop. Inclusion of Seahorse brought full integration of personal security features into the desktop, allowing users to communicate with each other securely and to easily manage their personal keys.
GUADEC, the annual GNOME Conference, happened in Birmingham, United Kingdom, during July. One of the pertinent topics of the conference was the concept of the GNOME Online Desktop. As online services such as social networking sites become more and more popular, the vision of the GNOME Online Desktop is to adapt the desktop so that it becomes the perfect window to the modern Web. This year's GUADEC saw a number of presentations centered around this concept, most notably Havoc Pennington and Bryan Clark's joint keynote address and Alex Graveley's keynote speech. These presentations helped bring the concept to the centre stage, and soon after GUADEC, http://online.gnome.org was set up to test out the various ideas around the initiative. GUADEC was also witness to a very interesting discussion on the future of GTK+, with developers pitching in their comments on what works for the existing versions of the toolkit and what does not. This year's recipient of the GNOME Thank You Pants, an annual award for Outstanding Service to the GNOME community, was Federico Mena Quintero, an active GNOME developer from the very beginning of the project. Memorable events during this GUADEC included the parties and the football match. The next year's GUADEC is scheduled to happen in Istanbul, Turkey.
September saw the release of GNOME 2.20, including a number of new useful features added to various applications like Evolution, Gedit, Tomboy, and Totem. GNOME 2.20 also marked the start of a revamped process for defining the roadmap, where a dedicated team would gather the roadmaps for the next release from each module maintainer, and then collate them in a wiki page. This gives an increased sense of direction for the overall project, especially for people who are observing it from outside.
October saw Vincent Untz taking up the job of the GNOME release manager, a post previously held by Elijah Newren. The latest GNOME technology based Internet tablet from Nokia, the N810, was also announced in October. The Royal Sonesta Hotel in Boston hosted this year's Boston Summit. The GNOME Online Desktop was once again one of the focal point of the summit. The GNOME Beer Summit, sponsored by Google, was also held during the Boston Summit.
The GNOME 2.22 roadmap was announced in November, a month which also saw the start of the GNOME Foundation 2007 Elections process.
A new board of directors of the GNOME Foundation was elected in December. In another significant development, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) reported the beginning of the deployment of 100,000 XO laptops in Uruguay, running the GNOME-technology-based Sugar environment. In India, as a part of the annual FOSS.In (one of the premier FOSS-related conferences in the region), a GNOME Project Day was held with GNOME contribution being one of the main focus areas. This was the first major GNOME related event in Asia, to be followed by the GNOME Asia Summit in China in 2008.
As the eventful 2007 slowly comes to an end, 2008 does indeed look bright for GNOME, with new and exciting developments poised around emerging areas like GNOME Online Desktop and GMAE (the GNOME Mobile and Embedded initiative).