GNOME Annual Report 2007 - Words about GNOME in 2007

"What were GNOME's achievements in 2007 that most appealed to you?"

• In 2007, I've been going to more events than any year before, and the feeling I got there is that people are happy with GNOME. They, of course, all have some pet bug, but they're still happy: GNOME, Official Desktop of Happy People. Personally, I'm also glad to see all the hard work being done in many areas, like Evolution, gio/gvfs, library.gnome.org, and the forthcoming crash.gnome.org. Watching translators work has been amazing--I'm closely following the French translation, of course--and I have to admit that having at last the documentation in your native tongue is simply fantastic. Ah, but I guess the best event for GNOME this year is that everybody has agreed that ice cream is what we want in the end. - Vincent Untz

• The greatest achievement for me and other Swedish users is that the Swedish translations has undergone a seriously large review and are very close to being perfect. I have, during the year, spent a lot of time on the Assistive Technology features, such as Orca in combination with the speech syntesizer eSpeak, which now works really good with Swedish. It's has been a year of much work, but seeing GNOME as it is today, makes me feel good inside. - Daniel Nylander

• The GNOME project has been rocking during 2007, there's a big group of people creating the most extraordinary technology you can imagine and using it for building amazing projects like the GNOME Mobile, the awesome development in new libraries like gvfs that will make the life easier to the Desktop Developers. Also, it's helping to make easy deployments of Linux in schools where you never thought it will be used, such as in Macedonia and a lot of small ones in Latin America. I've loved the community around GNOME this year; it has been growing quite fast; we saw it and felt it during the GUADEC at Birmingham, this is the most lovely community you can find in the Free Software world and it's the one that allowed me to participate, contribute, and get a job related to one of the things I love the most: GNOME. - Pedro Villavicencio

• GNOME's greatest achievement in 2007, in my opinion, was showing everyone that when it comes to users' freedom, we are in for no compromise. GNOME Foundation's decision to join ECMA-TC45-M to let Jody Goldberg be on the technical committee for Microsoft[®] Office Open XML specification is as controversial a decision as GNOME could make this year, yet it is the least we could do to ensure that our users will continue to enjoy the freedom to take their data out of proprietary formats and incrementally migrate to free software and open standards. I hope that 2008 is the year that the community at large comes to appreciate that decision as much as they would have done if GNOME had pretended that no problem exists, silently hoping that OOXML goes away on its own. - Behdad Esfahbod

• This was a great year for GNOME. Found myself reading about the OLPC XO computer in my local newspaper and thinking to myself "Hey, that runs GNOME!" In general, it's really fascinating seeing GNOME growing beyond the desktop into mobile phones, surf tablets, and other small computers. It was also great to see so many new faces in our community with a lot of energy and interesting ideas where we can go from here. - Andreas Nilsson

• GNOME has had a great year from my perspective. My highlight was GUADEC, as this is the first year I've been. It was also the first year I've participated in the Google Summer of Code (as a mentor), which was a great experience and gained the GNOME community some valuable new contributors. Similarly, the Google Highly Open Contest was a welcome addition that allowed us to get lots of those small tasks done, as well as providing a great introduction to GNOME to a larger audience. Of course, there is one more achievement I'm particularly proud of that may well go unnoticed: the replacement of Scrollkeeper with Rarian. This, together with the new parsing code in Yelp and the beginings of a new documentation editor, marks the start of work on our exciting new documentation project, Project Mallard, which we hope to advance lots more in 2008. - Don Scorgie

• In 2007, it became clearer than ever how widely GNOME technology will be used in new kinds of mobile devices and other consumer products. Unlike proprietary platforms, GNOME rushed to embrace the potential of open standards and the full diversity of the Internet. - Havoc Penington

• Mature. That is how I describe GNOME and GNOME during 2007. In the course of 2007, various infrastructure pieces have either been implemented or started that really put the finishing touches on GNOME. I'm talking about the move to SVN, GNOME Library, GNOME Socorro server, Build Bot, gvfs, dconf, Mango, Vala, more D-Bus usage, etc. This while, at the same time, there is the usual [biannual] improvement going on, also known as the next GNOME stable release. I really enjoy being part of GNOME and I encourage everyone to join. Be the 'I moved GNOME to D-SCM and all I got was one ice cream' blogger, or perhaps you like build systems more and end up porting all GNOME modules to use Waf. Whatever it is, start now. - Olav Vitters

• GNOME is a superior community work, every little achievement whether I'm interested or not, I appreciate that we're making our movement sympathized by others. We are changing modern desktop and computer experience over time. Now we have our software on devices without keyboards, mice, or even monitors with GNOME Online Desktop. Community-wise, I'm very happy that GNOME is easily available to more people having better internationalization tracking on the GTP side, thanks to new Damned Lies. It's also very fortunate that we're having our footprints in the mobile arena with GMAE. - Baris Cicek

Still waiting for:

• Jeff Waugh
• Christian Schaller
• Willie Walker

Design notes

See sketch here. If it doesn't fit in one page, we can spread in two or more special pages over the report.