GNOME has changed a lot in the last 5 years, and a lot has happened in that time. As a Foundation, we’ve gone from a small team of 3, to employing people to work on marketing, investment in technical frameworks, conference organisation and much more beyond. We’ve become the default desktop on all major Linux distributions. We’ve launched Flathub to help connect application developers directly to their users. We’ve dealt with patent suits, trademarks, and bylaw changes. We’ve moved our entire development platform to GitLab. We released 10 new GNOME releases, GTK 4 and GNOME 40. We’ve reset our relationships with external community partners and forged our way towards that future we all dream of – where everyone is empowered by technology they can trust.

For that future, we now need to build on that work. We need to look beyond the traditional role that desktop Linux has held – and this is something that GNOME has always been able to do. I’ve shown that the Foundation can be more than just a bank account for the project, and I believe that this is vital in our efforts to build a diverse and sustainable free software personal computing ecosystem. For this, we need to establish programs that align not only with the unique community and technology of the project, but also deliver those benefits to the wider world and drive real impact.

5 years has been the longest that the Foundation has had an ED for, and certainly the longest that I’ve held a single post for. I remember my first GUADEC as ED. As you may know, like many of you, I’m used to giving talks at conferences – and yet I have never been so nervous as when I walked out on that stage. However, the welcome and genuine warmth that I received that day, and the continued support throughout the last 5 years makes me proud of what a welcoming and amazing community GNOME is. Thank you all.

The GNOME Foundation was supported during 2020-2021 by a grant from Endless Network which funded the Community Engagement Challenge, strategy consultancy with the board, and a contribution towards our general running costs. At the end of last year we had a portion of this grant remaining, and after the success of our work in previous years directly funding developer and infrastructure work on GTK and Flathub, we wanted to see whether we could use these funds to invest in GNOME and the wider Linux desktop platform.

We’re very pleased to announce that we got approval to launch three parallel contractor engagements, which started over the past few weeks. These projects aim to improve our developer experience, make more applications available on the GNOME platform, and move towards equitable and sustainable revenue models for developers within our ecosystem. Thanks again to Endless Network for their support on these initiatives.

Flathub – Verified apps, donations and subscriptions (Codethink and James Westman)

This project is described in detail on the Flathub Discourse but goal is to add a process to verify first-party apps on Flathub (ie uploaded by a developer or an authorised representative) and then make it possible for those developers to collect donations or subscriptions from users of their applications. We also plan to publish a separate repository that contains only these verified first-party uploads (without any of the community contributed applications), as well as providing a repository with only free and open source applications, allowing users to choose what they are comfortable installing and running on their system.

Creating the user and developer login system to manage your apps will also set us up well for future enhancements, such managing tokens for direct binary uploads (eg from a CI/CD system hosted elsewhere, as is already done with Mozilla Firefox and OBS) and making it easier to publish apps from systems such as Electron which can be hard to use within a flatpak-builder sandbox. For updates on this project you can follow the Discourse thread, check out the work board on GitHub or join us on Matrix.

PWAs – Integrating Progressive Web Apps in GNOME (Phaedrus Leeds)

While everyone agrees that native applications can provide the best experience on the GNOME desktop, the web platform, and particularly PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) which are designed to be downloadable as apps and offer offline functionality, makes it possible for us to offer equivalent experiences to other platforms for app publishers who have not specifically targeted GNOME. This allows us to attract and retain users by giving them the choice of using applications from a wider range of publishers than are currently directly targeting the Linux desktop.

The first phase of the GNOME PWA project involves adding back support to Software for web apps backed by GNOME Web, and making this possible when Web is packaged as a Flatpak.  So far some preparatory pull requests have been merged in Web and libportal to enable this work, and development is ongoing to get the feature branches ready for review.

Discussions are also in progress with the Design team on how best to display the web apps in Software and on the user interface for web apps installed from a browser. There has also been discussion among various stakeholders about what web apps should be included as available with Software, and how they can provide supplemental value to users without taking priority over apps native to GNOME.

Finally, technical discussion is ongoing in the portal issue tracker to ensure that the implementation of a new dynamic launcher portal meets all security and robustness requirements, and is potentially useful not just to GNOME Web but Chromium and any other app that may want to install desktop launchers. Adding support for the launcher portal in upstream Chromium, to facilitate Chromium-based browsers packaged as a Flatpak, and adding support for Chromium-based web apps in Software are stretch goals for the project should time permit.

GTK4 / Adwaita – To support the adoption of Gtk4 by the community (Emmanuele Bassi)

With the release of GTK4 and renewed interest in GTK as a toolkit, we want to continue improving the developer experience and ease of use of GTK and ensure we have a complete and competitive offering for developers considering using our platform. This involves identifying missing functionality or UI elements that applications need to move to GTK4, as well as informing the community about the new widgets and functionality available.

We have been working on documentation and bug fixes for GTK in preparation for the GNOME 42 release and have also started looking at the missing widgets and API in Libadwaita, in preparation for the next release. The next steps are to work with the Design team and the Libadwaita maintainers and identify and implement missing widgets that did not make the cut for the 1.0 release.

In the meantime, we have also worked on writing a beginners tutorial for the GNOME developers documentation, including GTK and Libadwaita widgets so that newcomers to the platform can easily move between the Interface Guidelines and the API references of various libraries. To increase the outreach of the effort, Emmanuele has been streaming it on Twitch, and published the VOD on YouTube as well. 

In my capacity as the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, I have also written to the FSF. One of the most important parts of my role is to think of the well being of our community and the GNOME mission. One of the GNOME Foundation’s strategic goals is to be an exemplary community in terms of diversity and inclusion. I feel we can’t continue to have a formal association with the FSF or the GNU project when its main voice in the world is saying things that hurt this aim.

I greatly admire the work of FSF staffers and volunteers, but have now reached the point of concluding that the greatest service to the mission of software freedom is for Richard to step down from FSF and GNU and let others continue in his stead. Should this not happen in a timely manner, then I believe that severing the historical ties between GNOME, GNU and the FSF is the only path forward.

Edit: I’ve also cross-posted this to the GNOME discourse instance.

Events

We’ve been to a number of events in the last couple of months. April saw myself, Kristi, Bastian, Anisa and Stefano at FOSS-North in Sweden. Zeeshan Ali presented a talk on Open Source Geolocation.

At the end of April, Molly de Blanc and Sri Ramkrishna were at Linux Fest North West. Additionally, Molly delivered a talk related to community guideline enforcement, which was featured on the LFNW web page.

We also had a couple of hackfests in may – Rust+GNOME Hackfest #5 in Berlin at the start of the month, and the GStreamer Spring Hackfest 2019 in Oslo at the end of May.

Coming up in July, we’ll be attending OSCON and having a West Coast Hackfest – a combined 3-in-1 hackfest bringing in GTK, Documentation and Engagement teams!

GUADEC and GNOME.Asia

GUADEC and GNOME.Asia planning is now very much underway, and they’ve now both announced their venues and dates – GUADEC will be in Thessaloniki, Greece at the end of August, and GNOME.Asia will be in Gresik, Indonesia mid October! As always, we’re after sponsors for both of these, so if you know of any organisations who can help, please pass along our sponsorship brochure.

Staffing

For those that didn’t see my announcement, Molly de Blanc joined the Foundation as our Strategic Initiatives Manager! Molly comes from the Free Software Foundation where she was the Campaigns Manager, working on community organising around digital rights issues.
She’s also the President of the Board of Directors of the Open Source Initiative, and on the Debian Outreach and Anti-harassment teams. Regularly speaking at conferences around the world, she has represented multiple projects in community and corporate contexts.

Discourse

We’ve also been trying something new – we moved the gtk lists away from Mailman and over to discourse.gnome.org. The uptake has been rather impressive – we’re now seeing more topics on Discourse then all gtk-* lists grouped together, and more and more people engaged. We also moved over builder, and are looking at other lists, with a possible goal of eventually retiring mailman all together for general purpose discussions. If you’re interested, let me know!

Google Summer of Code

The Google Summer of Code internships are now underway, and we have a total of 10 students working for GNOME:

• Sajeer Ahamed Riyaf – Converting GStreamer plugins to Rust
• Srestha Srivastava – Improve GNOME Boxes express-installations by adding support to tree-based installations
• AJ Jordan – Implement a Migration Assistant
• Andrei Lişiţă – Add a saved states manager for GNOME Games
• Xiang Fan – Update of gtk-rs to support GTK4
• Stefanos Dimos – Adding the ability to preview links in Polari
• Mayank_Sharma – Improve Google-Drive support for Gvfs
• Ravgeet Dhillon – Rework the GTK website
• Sumaid – Full stack MusicBrainz integration for GNOME Music
• Gaurav Agrawal – Implement side by side diffs in Gitg

This is a fantastic set of projects, and I’m sure all students will be welcomed warmly!

We attended a couple of events this month. Firstly, we were at SCaLEx17, which  took place in Pasadena, California from 7th -10th March. It was a busy conference with a large number of attendees. We had a booth, and warm reception from visitors where we sold a large number of t-shirts and received donations on the booth. Talks were given by Matthias Classen on Containerized Desktops for Fun & Profit and Christian Hergert on Modernizing Desktop Linux Application Development.

After this, we were at the Free Software Foundation‘s event, LibrePlanet. As always, it’s a really community driven conference with a load of great talks. Given our historical association with the FSF and the GNU project, we received a really warm welcome with multiple people saying it was great to see us attend in person!

Another notable development is around our own conference, GUADEC. Our sponsorship brochure has now been published and we’re seeking sponsors! If you or someone you know is interested, then please get in touch :) I’ve heard that the Call for Papers will be opening really soon now, so it’s time to start thinking about giving a presentation at the event, if you’re not already. After unfortunately having to miss last year, I’m really looking forward to attending and meeting GNOME contributors and users – I’ll be attending are you?

I’m actually writing this from FOSS North, where we also have a stand. We’re also going to be attending Linux Fest North West later this month, where Sriram Ramkrishna will be joined by our new Development Coordinator.

That’s right, we’ve managed to find an excellent candidate to take on the role of Development Coordinator for the Foundation, making sure we can sustainably support the number of staff we now have, and they have accepted the role. Expect an email to foundation-announce in the next couple of weeks, introducing them.

We’ve made some really good progress on the Foundation’s Annual report, and we’re in the design phase. This means that it won’t be long until we get this finished, and this time well before GUADEC :)

Finally, we’re trialling the use of a Discourse instance as a new way of communicating. The gtk-devel list has moved over, and gnome-builder is also keen to use it rather than the mailing list. While rolling it out, it’s been really interesting to see people who wouldn’t usually talk to us use the platform. I know that sometimes email works well with people’s workflows, and fortunately you can interact with discourse just via email, if you so chose. We’ll see how it goes before I suggest other people move off mailman, but so far results are very positive.

That’s all for now, I’ll write again next month.

As you may have seen, we’ve hired three excellent people over the past couple of months. Kristi Progri has joined us as Program Coordinator, Bartłomiej Piorski as a devops sysadmin, and Emmanuele Bassi as our GTK Core developer. I hope to announce another new hire soon, so watch this space…

There’s been quite a lot of discussion around the Google API access, and GNOME Online Accounts. The latest update is that I submitted the application to Google to get GOA verified, and we’ve got a couple of things we’re working through to get this sorted.

Events all round!

Although the new year’s conference season is just kicking off, it’s been a busy one for GNOME already. We were at FOSDEM in Brussels where we had a large booth, selling t-shirts, hoodies and of course, the famous GNOME socks. I held a meeting of the Advisory Board, and we had a great GNOME Beers event – kindly sponsored by Codethink.

We also had a very successful GTK Hackfest – moving us one step closer to GTK 4.0.

Coming up, we’ll have a GNOME booth at:

• SCALEx17 – Pasadena, California (7^th – 10^th March)
• LibrePlanet – Boston Massachusetts (23^rd – 24^th March)
• FOSS North – Gothenburg, Sweden (8^th – 9^th April)
• Linux Fest North West – Bellingham, Washington (26^th – 28^th April)

If you’re at any of these, please come along and say hi! We’re also planning out events for the rest of the year. If anyone has any particularly exciting conferences we may not have heard of, please let us know.

Discourse

It hasn’t yet been announced, but we’re trialling an instance of Discourse for the GTK and Engagement teams. It’s hopeful that this may replace mailman, but we’re being quite careful to make sure that email integration continues to work. Expect more information about this in the coming month. If you want to go have a look, the instance is available at discourse.gnome.org

General

As per usual, our main focus has been on the hiring of new staff members for the Foundation. We’ve completed a few second interviews and a couple of first interviews. We’re aiming to start making offers around the end of November. If you have put in an application, and haven’t heard back in a while, please don’t worry! It’s simply due to a large number of people who’ve applied and the very manual way we’ve had to process these. Everyone should hear back.

We’ve also had some interesting times with our banking. The short version is, we’ve moved banks to another provider. This has taken quite a bit of work, but hopefully, this should be settling down now.

As mentioned in issue #43, we have an employee handbook. However, it’s not public and hasn’t been updated. We’ve now managed to find a service that will do some of this for us, so we don’t need to create a whole load of text.

Finally, some minor items: Three trademark agreements were granted/modified, one GDPR request is being considered (removal of email from list archives), the GNOME namespace on handshake.org has been requested (which involved a number of calls with our trademark lawyer), a Dun and Bradstreet number (D-U-N-S) has been requested so we can then request a free Apple code signing certificate and the EU events box should now have a laptop.

Conferences

SustainOSS Summit

This event was quite interesting and was held in London at the end of October. There was an estimated 150 people attend, and all to talk about the sustainability of open source software, and how this can be improved (sustainability here should be read in all forms; financial, newcomer experience; maintainer burnout etc).

Freenode#Live

Held in Bristol at the start of November Freenode#Live was once again an impressive event, and I presented my “Why Free Software on the desktop matters” talk. The most useful aspect of the event is to meet up with key people in the FOSS community, and Advisory Board members.

Finally, as we were leaving the venue, one of the venue staff members came up to say hello. He’s a professional graphic illustrator/designer and although having never heard about free software before, was impressed by the conference and our passion that he’s volunteering to help with design work.

Recruitment

Recruitment continues for our four positions that we announced earlier this year, but I’m pleased to say we’re in the final stages for these. For those interested, the process went a little bit like this:

• Applicants sent in a CV and cover letter
• If they were suitable for the position on a quick read of the CV and letter, they got a short questionnaire asking for more details, such as “What do you know about the GNOME Foundation?”
• Those with interesting answers get sent to a first interview, which mostly technical
• Then, those who are still in the process are invited to a second interview, which is competency-based
• At the end of all this, we hope to make an offer to the best candidate!

End of year

For those who don’t know, the Foundation’s financial year runs from the start of October to the end of September. This means we have quite a bit of work to do to:

1. Finalise the accounts for last year and submit our tax returns
2. Make a new budget for the forthcoming year

Work has already begun on this, and I hope to finalise the new budget with the board at the Foundation Hackfest being held next week.

Libre Application Summit

LAS was held in Denver, Colorado, and I attended. There were 20 talks and three BoF
sessions held, as well as a number of social events. From looking around, there were probably around 60-70 people, including representatives from KDE and Elementary. It was particularly pleasing to see a number of students from the local university attend and present a lightning talk.

I also had meetings with System76 and Private Internet Access, as well as a couple of local companies.

Speaking of System76, we also had a nice tour of their new factory. I knew they were taking manufacturing in-house, but I didn’t realise the extent of this process. It’s not just assembly, but taking raw sheet metal, bending it into the right shape and painting them!

My meetings with PIA were also interesting – I got to see the new VPN client that they have, which I’m assured will be free software when released. There was a couple of issues I could see about how to integrate that with GNOME, and we had a good session running through these.

Other conferences coming up

In October, I’m hoping to attend Sustain Summit 2018, in London, followed by Freenode.Live in Bristol, UK. I’ll be speaking at the latter, which is in November. Then, after a couple of days at home, GNOME is going to SeaGL! Meet me and Rosanna in Seattle at the GNOME booth!

Friends of GNOME

Another thing that happened was fixing the Friends of GNOME signup page. For some reason, unknown to us, when you submitted the form to PayPal, it redirected to the home page rather than the payment page. This didn’t happen if you selected “EUR” as the payment method, or if you selected “EUR” and then “USD” before submitting. After lots of head scratching (an analysis of the POST data showed that it was /identical/ in each case) I changed the POST to a GET, and it suddenly started working again. Confusion all around, but it should now be working again.

I arrived a day early into Boston, as Deb Nicholson had kindly helped organise a SpinachCon. The idea behind these is to do some user testing and see actual people using GNOME. We were also accompanied by Dataverse and Debian. It was interesting to watch people try and accomplish some tasks (like “Set a wallpaper” and “start a screen recording”) and see what happens. This is probably worth a blog post all on its own, so I’ll write that up separately. For those who want a sneak peak, it wasn’t just usability improvements that could come out of it, but we discovered a couple of bugs as well.

Apart from that, both myself and Sriram Ramkrishna have been added as mods of reddit.com/r/gnome to help out there, and I gave a wide-ranging interview for Destination Linux!

• The annual report is moving ahead. I’ve moved up the timelines a bit here from previous years, so hopefully, the people who very kindly help author this can remember what we did in the 2016/17 financial year!
• GUADEC/GNOME.Asia/LAS sponsorship – elements are coming together for the sponsorship brochure
  • Some sponsors are lined up, and these will be announced by the usual channels – thanks to everyone who supports the project and our conferences!
• Shell Extensions – It’s been noticed that reviews of extensions have been taking quite some time recently, so I’ve stepped in to help. I still think that part of the process could be automated, but at the moment it’s quite manual. Help is very much appreciated!
• The Code of Conduct consultation has been useful, and there’s been a couple of points raised where clarity could be added. I’m getting those drafted at the moment, and hope to get the board to approve this soon.
• A couple of administrative bits:
  • We now have a filing system for paperwork in NextCloud
  • Reviewing accounts for the end of year accounts – it’s the end of the tax year, so our finances need to go to the IRS
  • Tracking of accounts receivable hasn’t been great in the past, probably not helped by GNUCash. I’m looking at alternatives at the moment.
• Helping out with a couple of trademark issues that have come up
• Regular working sessions for Flathub legal bits with our lawyers
• I’ll be at LibrePlanet 2018 this weekend, and I’m giving a talk on Sunday. With the FSF, we’re hosting a SpinachCon on Friday. This aims to do some usability testing and finding those small things which annoy people.