GNOME Annual Report 2007 - GNOME Foundation in 2007
Author: BehdadEsfahbod and VincentUntz
In 2007, the GNOME Foundation gave support to community and local groups activities around the world. In the Advisory Board, we received important new members and highly relevant topics such as GPLv3, OOXML, GTK+ maintenance, and others were discussed.
Sponsored activities
In 2007, the GNOME Foundation once again organized the Boston Summit. It was considered a success by all parties, overcoming some last minute organization issues and a forced change of venue. The Board members would like to thank Rosanna Yuen, Owen Taylor, and John Palmieri for their help, and Google for sponsoring pub night at the summit. As part of the Boston Summit, the Foundation also sponsored and facilitated the organization of a Java-GNOME Hackfest and an Accessibility Summit, the latter being followed by the nearby Mozilla Accessibility Summit. Thanks to Andrew Cowie and William Walker for organizing these focused events.
We also supported presence of local groups in two major events, the 4th Forum GNOME in Brazil and FOSS.in in India. Thanks to Izabel Valverde and Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay for the organization of these events.
The Foundation also sponsored travel of two members to talk about GNOME at local conferences: Vincent Untz traveled to RMLL in France and Máirín Duffy to FOSS.in.
The US GNOME Event Box traveled to SCALE, EclipseCon, and LinuxWorld Expo in California, and OLF in Ohio. Thanks to Rosanna Yuen for managing the box, and Eitan Isaacson, Ben Konrath, Ken VanDine, Jorge Castro, and Patrick Wagstrom for representing GNOME at these events.
The European GNOME Event Box traveled to CeBIT in Hannover, LinuxTag in Berlin, OpenExpo in Zurich, and come2Linux in Essen. Thanks to Murray Cumming for managing the box, and Josh Kress, Sven Herzberg, Michael Natterer, Jürg Billeter, and Markus Ortel for representing GNOME at these events.
The line-up for 2008 events already looks quite exciting, including: helping launch the first GNOME Asia Summit, an annual GNOME event for the Far East; organizing the Berlin GTK+ Hackfest; an accessibility bounty program; the Boston Summit; and also sponsoring the Latin America Tour in Chile and Southern-Hemisphere Summer Event in Peru.
Advisory Board
At the beginning of 2007, the Advisory Board of the GNOME Foundation consisted of 15 members and continued to grow logically, adding two new members, in addition to Canonical. While Canonical joined in 2006, we could only announce their membership this year. In June, Igalia decided to increase their involvement in GNOME and also joined the Advisory Board. With GNOME and Mozilla sharing many values and having been close for a long time, it was not a surprise for anyone that the Mozilla Foundation joined in December, the latest member to date.
Various topics were discussed between the Board and the Advisory Board during three phone meetings in March, May and November, a face-to-face meeting at GUADEC, and through email communication in-between meetings. The board reported ongoing activities to the Advisory Board, including the creation of the 2007 budget, the organization of events and the re-design of the GNOME website. The face-to-face meeting introduced more technical topics, including the current situation of Mono, how the Foundation can help the Online Desktop initiative, and the need for more focus and leadership that the GNOME Roadmap should bring.
Due to issues having been raised by GTK+ maintainers, the current situation of GTK+ was debated with Advisory Board members. The Advisory Board members decided to give more work time to their GTK+ contributors to directly work upstream. Other options to provide additional help with maintenance, including hiring a contributor or organizing more GTK+ events, were also proposed and discussed. Thanks to the Advisory Board support, this discussion lead to concrete results with more time for contributions as well as the GTK+ hackfest that took place at the beginning of 2008.
The state of upstream documentation was also debated and discussed. Coordination with GNOME distributors for end user documentation would help improve overall documentation. There are also opportunities to pool resources for developer documentation as many members see the value of high quality developer documentation. Improving the documentation situation is, however, still an ongoing task of the Board.
GNOME Mobile has been a primary topic, including coordinating the public launch of the initiative, as well as organizing a mini-meeting at GUADEC this past year and the presence of GNOME representatives at relevant conferences to represent the initiative.
With the release of the GPLv3, a number of concerns were raised. The current license situation in GNOME has been simple for a long time, including LGPL in the platform, and GPL/LGPL in the desktop. Since the Foundation doesn't own the copyright but the individual contributors do, the Foundation can not force the choice of license in GNOME. However, the Board and the Advisory Board both see an interest in documenting the current situation and the implications, good or bad, of any change.
The GNOME Foundation's involvement in ECMA TC45-M (OOXML) was the main discussion point during the last meeting. The sole purpose of GNOME’s involvement is to ensure interoperability and enabling the correct implementation of OOXML. While the Foundation does not support this file format as the main format or as a standard, it appears it is hard to convey this position since it is a new approach to this kind of problem. The Board will more than likely request more input from the Advisory Board to help better convey this position in future statements about this topic.
Finally, three of the Advisory Board representatives have agreed to help the Board to hire or contract someone to work on the GNOME infrastructure, since the current system administrators are all busy volunteers and there is a need for more work in this area.
With all those discussions, the Advisory Board has been of great help to the Board and it will certainly be the case again in 2008!
Design notes
See sketch here. In case we get the financial summary, this will be on a table on the right side. The article will be divided in sections.
