1 Table of Contents

Foreword Letter from the Executive Director 4

A year in review GNOME in 2008 8 GNOME Mobile 16

Events and Community initiatives Interview with Willie Walker 20 GNOME around the world 24

GNOME Foundation Foundation Finances 30 List of all 2008 donors 33

2

Letter from Stormy Peters Stormy Peters is the GNOME Foundation Executive Director and has great experience in the industry and with the open source culture.

Hello GNOME Lovers! seek them out and to invite them to come play. (Actually, I felt welcome from day -1, GNOME's goal is to bring free and open as I met a bunch of guys on the plane who source computing to everyone regardless of turned out to also be going to GUADEC. I ability. I consider myself extremely lucky to spent my first day in walking have joined the project as executive director around with some guys from and of the GNOME Foundation. It's a pleasure trying to stay awake through jetlag. I and a privilege to work with thousands of pe- remember saying we just ople dedicated to making free had to stay awake until dinner available for everyone The spirit and time.) on desktops and mobile plat- dedication of the forms. I don't think it's an GNOME community to One of the most common exaggeration to say that their goals of creating questions I get asked is GNOME technology is chan- a free and open source why did you take this job? ging the world for many from software ... is I took this job because I lo- smart phone users to kids using unparalleled. ve the people and mission of XO's. the GNOME community. The spirit and dedication of the GNOME com- At my very first GUADEC in 2001, I was gre- munity to their goals of creating a free and eted with "YOU'RE A GIRL!" This was shou- open source software desktop and their ted across a huge auditorium. Then when commitment to having fun and welcoming we went around the room and introduced everyone is unparalleled. What is often seen ourselves one by one, everyone applauded - as idealistic sits well with me - we are here for each person. From day one I was part of to change the world. And we are doing that the community, and I was in no way unique. everyday. People are using free and open The GNOME community continues to not source software around the world, from the only welcome new members but to actively big enterprises of America to the small villa-

4 ges in Africa. All of these people are welcome in the GNOME community as both users and developers - they deserve world-class free and open source software.

GNOME has come a long ways in the past 7 ye- ars (I can't imagine doing individual rounds of introductions at our GUADEC 2008!) and GNO- ME is ideally situated to make huge advances forward in the next year.

Global Community. During the past year we've expanded our global reach, in addition to our annual conference in , GUADEC, we now also have events in Latin America and Asia. In 2008 we held our first GNOME.Asia in Beijing. 300+ people attended and a Beijing GNOME Users' group was created as a result! At GNOME.Asia, I was approached by people asking all sorts of questions from "how do I get started in GNOME?" to "how do I find a job that will use my GNOME skills?" But by far my favorite question was translated for me in a ro- om of 20+ women, "why are you worried about women in open source? There are lots of us!" We could all learn about women in computing from Asian countries. Latin America and the US also had lots of activity with Forum Brazil, Latin America Tour and the Boston Summit.

GNOME Mobile. GNOME Mobile is perhaps one of the most exciting areas at the moment. You've all seen the explosion of as well as netbooks and other mobile devices. GNOME Mobile provides a computing platform 5 for these devices that is not only 100% free had 26 Google Summer of Code Students and open source software but it's built on working on GNOME, mentored by some our existing GNOME software. That means amazing developers. We put together the that you get the power of your desktop com- Accessibility Outreach Program to attract puter on your handheld. This is bringing new developers and to add some features new products to all fields - at OSCON I got that are key to making sure GNOME ena- to see Labquest's Vernier, a scientific device bles computers to be usable and accessible for students - it lets them measure to all regardless of their abilities. I got to everything from water temperature to flow meet a number of them at GUADEC and was rates- and graph it right on their own devi- impressed with their questions. It's good to ce. And it's cheap enough for every student see them still part of the community and to use their own. Open source technologies blogging on Planet GNOME. Next year we like GNOME Mobile enable that type of inno- plan to build on these as well as participate vation. The GNOME Mobile team continues in programs like the FOSS Humanitarian to build more innovation and change into project and launch new programs around our existing software to make su- getting business students invol- re it meets mobile needs. ...we look forward ved in . Motorola, Intel, Texas Ins- to making sure they truments and many have the software they Corporate sponsorship. others all use GNOME need to make a difference In addition to projects Mobile in their solutions. that bring in new GNOME During 2009 we'll continue in the world. developers and users, we al- to add more technologies to so have had added new new cor- GNOME Mobile, more members to the com- porate members to our advisory board, munity and we'll see new products launch Motorola and Google. Both have been a part that use GNOME Mobile. of the GNOME community for a while and are now strengthening their commitment. Developer community. As I said earlier, Motorola is a member of GNOME Mobile the GNOME community is always looking to and uses GNOME technologies in their cell bring more people into the GNOME commu- phones. Google has been a long time GNO- nity. This year we had a number of success- ME supporter through projects like Google ful programs that brought us great new Summer of Code, GNOME Accessibility Ou- features and code, but more importantly in- treach and GUADEC sponsorship. We look troduced new people to our community. We forward to having their expertise on the

6 GNOME advisory board. With these two new Speaking of universal access, did you know corporate additions to its advisory board, that Supersonic Imagine makes a scanner the GNOME Foundation continues to that detects breast cancer using GNOME te- strengthen its industry support and shows chnologies? Or how about One Laptop Per that the support for free and open source Child, the tremendously popular laptop for software is growing - especially in the mobi- children in developing countries? The peo- le space with technologies like GNOME Mo- ple, projects and products that are benefi- bile. The additional funds and resources will ting from GNOME's free and open source be used on programs that support GNOME's technologies are growing and we look goal of universal access such as accessibility forward to making sure they have the outreach programs, usability studies and in- software they need to make a difference in ternationalization efforts. We also added the the world. Mozilla Foundation and Labs to our advisory board, two sister organizations that You can read about all the accomplishments share our dedication to free software and in- I've talked about and many more in the rest ternet and computing access for everyone. of this report. Please take the time to see the work we're proud of, use GNOME prou- Our existing sponsors contributed much to dly and feel free to join us online! GNOME this year. For example, Red Hat has worked on many desktop technologies like Best, Online Desktop, OpenSolaris ships with GNOME, funded the migration of the Stormy Peters accessibility infastructure to D-Bus. Big Ku- Executive Director dos to all of our sponsors for all the work GNOME Foundation they have enabled this year: Access, Canoni- cal, , FSF, HP, Google, IBM, , Imendio, Intel, Motorola, Mozilla Foundati- on, Nokia, Novell, OpenedHand, Red Hat, Software Freedom Law Center, Sugar Labs and Sun. In addition to funding salaries and our traditional events, they also funded seve- ral very successful hackfests and accessibi- lity projects.

7 GNOME in 2008 The GNOME community has worked throughout 2008 to continue its efforts towards offering the best desktop and the best platform to develop applications

Offering the Latest Technologies a gap. And last but not least, GNOME 2.22 introduces GIO and GVFS for It has become a ritual over the years: in networked filesystems: this came as a March and September of each year, a replacement to GNOME-VFS, which was new stable branch of GNOME is relea- known to have several shortcomings. sed on the day according to the pre-esta- One of the most visible feature introdu- blished schedule. This allows users to ced by GVFS is a FUSE mountpoint that have access to the latest features and lets all applications access the remote fi- bug fixes very quickly, developers to les, even if the applications are not awa- start using new libraries and technologi- re of GVFS. es as soon as they appear promising, and distributors to rely on a known sche- After 2.22, the community worked hard dule that they know will be respected. for six months to offer to the users GNO- ME 2.24 in September. This release is GNOME 2.22 offered important improve- the first one to include the GNOME Mo- ments in all parts of the stack. Users bile development platform as an official could enjoy , a new application to release set. GNOME Mobile brings stan- take photos or make videos using web- dard desktop components together to cams, and apply fun effects on those pho- provide a core platform on which distri- tos and videos. , the GNOME butors and handheld manufacturers can manager, also introduced a win- build rich programming environments; it dow compositing mode on capable plat- is at the heart of various mobile device forms, which improves the user platforms, including , the AC- experience with drop shadows, live previ- CESS Platform, the LiMo referen- ews of windows or real transparency. ce platform, and Moblin. The 2.24 The IDE finally became part of Desktop also offered numerous new fea- the Developer Tools, successfully filling tures and changes, especially in the communication area: the ins- 8 tant messenger was included, which is to clean up the usage of old libraries, the first step to a properly integrated ins- and many applications were therefore tant messenging experience. The new ported away from GNOME-VFS, libgno- version of , the SIP audio/video con- me, libgnomeui, etc. The future of GTK+ ference client, was a major step forward, was discussed and a roadmap towards with a new interface, support for SIP pre- GTK+ 3.0 was prepared, the goal being sence and better video codecs support. to clean the library and prepare the way Many other areas were also improved to to new features that will make GTK+ help the user in his daily life; a good even more attractive. GNOME 3.0 was example of this is better support for con- also discussed and the release team has necting an external screen to the compu- started working on a concrete plan to le- ter (e.g. a projector for giving ad the project to a new major milestone. presentations). New technologies developed around Of course, during the year, the GNOME GNOME also star- stack evolved and different tasks clearly appeared. Many contri- butors pushed

9 ted getting some traction, like PolicyKit. is broken in svn trunk. Its purpose is to provide a consistent way for applications to gain extra privile- One of the most debated topic during ges; a good example of its usage is its in- 2008 certainly was the use of a DVCS tegration in the clock applet to enable (distributed version control system). It the user to easily change the current ti- was covered in many threads and IRC mezone, or the current date and time. discussions, but also during GUADEC The PulseAudio sound server also star- and other events. John Carr worked on ted being integrated in GNOME, which providing a complete mirror of the GNO- will make several new features possible. ME modules via bzr and , and therefo- re people were able to actually test two Infrastructure Behind the Project of the main contenders and use them for their daily work. Behdad Esfahbod clo- With hundreds of modules hosted by the sed the year by organizing a survey GNOME project, the GNOME infrastruc- about DVCS, in order to have some real ture can certainly be considered a criti- data to analyze and to help the commu- cal piece in the workflow of our nity decide the path forward. contributors. It's therefore logical to see it change over time and be adapted to Finally, translators were offered a gift at the various needs. the very end of the year by Stéphane Raimbault and Claude Paroz, with the The GNOME instance of bugzilla has merge of damned-lies and vertimus. The had difficult times with some load issues former was already deployed by GNO- and has been running an old version of ME and generates statistics for all lan- the software. But there are now plans to guages, helping track the status of start a migration to the latest version, translations and the string changes. Ver- and the sysadmins are keeping in mind timus is a tool that was originally deve- the load issues as they think about how loped by the french translation team to to improve our bug tracking system. improve the workflow inside a translati- on team: it enables contributors to know The Build Brigade worked hard on ma- who is working on what, and what is the king continuous builds of GNOME a rea- status of a proposed update to a transla- lity. Thanks to jhbuild integration and to tion. There are already plans to offer a the help of volunteers to set up a few cli- web interface to commit the translati- ents, contributors can easily check what ons, which would make it possible to 10 contribute translations without having to one inter-process communication me- know about a version control system. chanism.

Actions in the Accessibility World And last but not least, the GNOME Foundation organised the "GNOME Ou- The accessibility of GNOME is one as- treach Program: Accessibility", with the pect many contributors are very proud help of the Mozilla Foundation, Canoni- of. It also helps, with our work on usabi- cal, Google and Novell. This program ai- lity and localization, to make the softwa- med to increase the awareness of the re we create truly usable by anyone. accessibility-related issues, especially in the context of computer applications, to Much work was done on the technical si- encourage people to work on them and de. Among other examples, close coope- to improve the accessibility support in ration with Mozilla has led to excellent free software. Various tasks were propo- accessibility support in Fire- sed to participants, inclu- fox 3 with the Orca screen- The Accessibility of ding a revamp of the reader. A vast number of GNOME is one aspect accessibility-related do- applications also saw many contributors cumentation and the de- their support improved in a are proud of velopment of an similar fashion. New support accessibility testing strategy. for mouse accessibility was introduced, Smaller tasks were also made available, adding various features like the ability like fixing minor accessibility bugs or to open the contextual menu with only providing new icons for accessibility the- one mouse button, or the ability to per- mes. A new application called Mouse- form different types of clicks (e.g. single Trap was created as part of this click, double click, context click, and program and shows promising results: it dragging) without using a mouse button. enables mouse control, via head move- ments captured by a webcam. Work on a new version of AT-SPI, which is an essential part of the accessibility Thanks to the hard work of the accessi- stack, has also begun, the goal being to bility community, the GNOME project replace the use of CORBA and to move won a Lutèce d'Or prize during Ca- to D-Bus instead. This is consistent with pitale du Libre: "GNOME Outreach Pro- the GNOME-wide goal to move away gram: Accessibility" was awarded the from CORBA to D-Bus, and to use only best community-driven effort of the ye- 11 ar!

GNOME at Events

There was so much energy in the project in 2008 that there were more events than the previous years, especially thanks to the efforts to organize hackfests.

Four Foundation-sponsored hackfests oc- curred during the year. First, in March, around 30 hackers converged to () to participate in the first GTK+ hackfest. Sponsored by many companies, this hackfest was critical in having the right people meet to discuss the future of GTK+ and prepare the road towards GTK+ 3.0. A few months later, in Septem- ber, a group of similar size also met in Ber- lin for a hackfest, to try to make this tricky area move forward. In Oc- tober, around 20 people went to Boston (MA, USA) one week before the Boston Summit to think about the future of user experience in GNOME. This resulted in two main proposals: a new GNOME revisiting the panel and the window mana- gement, and a complete overhaul of the document management on the desktop. Fi- nally, in November, a handful of hac- kers went to Bolzano (Italy) to work together on the cairo library.

FOSDEM is generally one of the first im- portant conferences in the year for the 12 GNOME community, and it was still true rous contributions on bugzilla, in the in 2008: with a booth animated by many release team and also in the infrastruc- volunteers and a devroom with technical ture team. Finally, the release team pro- talks, the GNOME community could not posed an initial plan for GNOME 3, be ignored at FOSDEM in February. The creating some excitement within the GNOME t-shirt for this FOSDEM also in- community. troduced the now famous GNOME equa- tion, with much success: it was quite The traditional Boston Summit was held common to meet people with this green in the MIT in Cambridge (MA, USA) in t-shirt during the event. The project had the middle of October. Many technical therefore a highly visible presence in topics were discussed, with many people Brussels (Belgium), and the success of interested in GObject introspection and the first GNOME Beer Event that attrac- accessibility, for example. The ideas de- ted people from other communities con- veloped during the user experience firmed this. hackfest the week before were also pre- sented. The social event was also a good July saw several hundreds of GNOME occasion for the contributors to play po- contributors go to () to ol. Or for some, to learn how to play! attend GUADEC, the annual GNOME conference. This event is always a place 2008 was also the first year of a new of celebration for the community, with event, GNOME.Asia, which was organi- many friends being able to at last see ea- zed at the end of October in Beijing ch other again or live music from a band (China). The community had long seen made of GNOME contributors; but it's al- that there were not enough important so a time in the year where a huge GNOME events in Asia, and a team of amount of work is realized in relatively people decided to step up to change little time: talks inspire contributors, de- this. The conference was organized with cisions can be made much faster, and pe- the help of the Foundation, but also of ople are writing down many plans for various industry leaders. It succeeded in the next months of development. GUA- bringing together GNOME users and de- DEC is also where, each year, one per- velopers, and a large set of topics were son gets recognized for his contributions debated, ranging from very technical to the project with the GNOME Pants ones (input methods, for example) to to- award: This year, Olav Vitters was cho- pics accessible to newcomers (introduc- sen for this prize, because of his nume- tions to various technologies). Everyone 13 had in mind the will to improve the GNO- The Advisory Board of the GNOME ME community in Asia, and make it even Foundation continued to attract new more active than it currently is. And to members, with Mozilla Foundation arri- make sure that there couldn't be any ving at the very beginning of the year, doubt about the quality of this event, a followed by Google, Motorola and Sugar tour trip to the Great Wall was organi- Labs. Those new members represent zed. well the diversity of the Advisory Board, composed of both non-profit organizati- The local groups also participated in a ons who share a philosophy and goals, vast number of other events, but also and industry key players. went on to organize some events them- selves like Involucrate+GNOME (Lima, A vote in 2007 approved the decision Perú), Fórum GNOME (Foz do Iguaçu, that the next Foundation Board would Brazil) and Día GNOME (Valparaiso, Chi- be elected for 18 months to have the fol- le). lowing board be able to meet quickly af- ter being elected at GUADEC. Hence, no Teams in Movement elections were held in 2008. But in De- cember, decided to focus his The GNOME community is always mo- time on other projects and Diego Esca- ving, with newcomers joining, contribu- lante Urrelo has been appointed to the tors leaving to focus on other priorities, empty seat: Diego was a candidate in old friends coming back. This continuous the elections in 2007, and his energy movement is a good sign that the project and dedication made him an obvious is alive and well. choice.

The biggest highlight in this area is pro- The release team itself saw quite some bably the fact that Stormy Peters joined changes, with former release manager the GNOME Foundation as Executive Di- Elijah Newren stepping down from the rector in July, at the very beginning of team and being replaced by Lucas Ro- GUADEC. Stormy has already brought a cha. A few months later, Matthias Cla- lot of energy to the Foundation and is sen of GTK+ fame filled the empty spot working hard at building stronger links left by the departing John Palmieri. And with the industry, as well as helping the in November, since everybody was im- GNOME community to achieve its vision. pressed by his continuous dedication of tracking latest dependencies and build 14 failures, Frédéric Péters was logically in- tunity to have young students learn vited to be the latest member. about free software in general, and GNOME in our case, and to have them Finally, a GNOME Mobile stewardship te- start being involved. Some of the partici- am was announced by the Foundation Bo- pants are still in the community today! ard. Composed of Paul Cooper, Dave Neary and Stormy Peters, the team aims Getting new contributors to participate to facilitate the creation of a strategy in GNOME is of course important, but around GNOME Mobile and to work on the project was also blessed with many communication for this part of the GNO- new users thanks to the emerging net- ME project. book market. Several companies are in- deed offering GNU/Linux-based preloads Reaching Out to New People that are using GNOME as the user inter- face. This is certainly a big success for Thanks to Google, GNOME could partici- the project as it's a recognition of the pate again in the Google Summer of Co- hard work done by the community on de. This made it possible for 30 students the code, on usability, on accessibility, to work with the GNOME community, on translations, on documentation, and and lead to various successful projects: in all the other areas! the Anjuta IDE gained new features (like a git plugin, and better integration with glade) and the F-Spot got improved, for example. GNOME also sponsored a project for Avahi, the widely used project to handle service discovery on local networks.

GNOME also participated in a similar program targetted at high school stu- dents, the Google Highly Open Participa- tion Contest, where students were able to start contribution on all areas of GNO- ME, from bug fixing, to translations and documentation. This was the first edition of this contest, and it was a good oppor- 15 GNOME Mobile More time with GNOME.

This year has been eventful in the GNO- of standard interfaces for mobile phone ME Mobile world, to say the least. We ha- application development, folded up shop ve seen new adoption of the GNOME and joined forces with the LiMo founda- platform in mobile and embedded devi- tion. LiMo aims to provide a reference ces, and increasing momentum from platform of Linux for mobile phone ma- GNOME Mobile participants. We have se- nufacturers. Several components of the en new releases of core GNOME Mobile GNOME Mobile platform, including technologies, and the appearance on the GTK+ and GStreamer, have been inclu- of some high-quality compo- ded as required components of the LiMo nents which will be without doubt valua- R2 platform. This is a great boost to the ble additions to the platform. In platform as it gives them solid working addition, we've seen some growth in technologies to build on, and we should other mobile technologies. While we had start seeing the first R2 phones in early hoped everyone would use GNOME Mo- 2009. bile, we are happy to see the industry and the market place grow. As more and Moblin, the mobile Linux edition from more people use mobile technologies in Intel which targets netbooks and other unique ways we are confident they will small form computers, and a significant see the value of free and open source contributor and user of GNOME techno- software solutions like GNOME Mobile logies, had its second release this year, and will join our growing community of and with it, a significant announcement - vendors. Intel had agreed to acquire Ope- nedHand, specialists in mobile free Some of the alternative solutions are al- software application development, and ready moving towards GNOME Mobile. developers of Matchbox, Poky Linux, The year started with a bang, as LiPS, , GUPnP and Pimlico. the Linux Phone Standards group, an in- dustry group which aimed to define a set Mobile and Ubuntu Netbook 16 Edition also had releases this year that cool stuff like the Box2D physics engine, included GNOME Mobile. When the Clutter has been making waves with im- OLPC project had a change of direction, pressive demos of iPhone-like functiona- widespread support of Sugar enabled lity. Clutter is now included in the latest the charismatic Walter Bender, former Maemo platform, in moblin v2 and in CTO of OLPC, to spin off Sugar Labs as Ubuntu Mobile, and work is underway a new non-profit to develop the innovati- to enable further integration into the ve Sugar user interface built on top of GNOME platform. the GNOME platform. Tracker These events have brought with them several new participants in There are many candidates for runner- GNOME Mobile, and we have seen up. Tracker has come of age representatives from Azingo, Mo- this year, making its way torola, Purple Labs, , into the Maemo plat- Sugar Labs and LiMo contribu- form. Tracker is an ob- ting on various GNOME forums ject store and file this year, alongside long-time indexer which stores me- contributors like Igalia, Fluen- tadata about files and do and Imendio. other objects like , and allows fast retrieval. Clutter GeoClue, a library which makes supporting geolocali- The prize for star software sation in your application newcomer of the year goes easy, has made an appearan- to Clutter, which has taken ce in a released device, the the GNOME and GNOME Garmin Nüvi 860, and looks set Mobile worlds by storm since its to become a more integrated initial releases in 2006. Clutter is a li- part of the GNOME platform soon. brary for creating fast, visually rich and animated graphical user interfaces. It Others you might not think of uses OpenGL or OpenGL ES for rende- ring, but gives the developer a really sim- The year brought other new device rele- ple API to use. With integration of some ases. Nokia brought out a WiMax edition

17 of its N810 personal internet tablet. Bug Murphy of ACCESS tuned in at a distan- Labs released a new version of the BUG, ce during GUADEC to show off some a collection of easy-to-use electronic mo- work that he and his team have been dules that snap together to build any doing with dynamically readjusting the gadget you can imagine, with GNOME GNOME desktop with XRandr in mobile Mobile-based Poky Linux at its heart. devices with an accelerometer, and he is And showing that GNOME in devices do- working to get that work integrated into es not necessarily mean small devices, GTK+ soon. French company Supersonic Imagine brought a GNOME-based breast cancer While its members make progress with scanner, the Aixplorer, to market. It's ap- GNOME Mobile and devices that use it, plications like this that bring home the GNOME Mobile is still a relatively new potential power of a completely free group and participants are still working software platform. on the best way to collaborate and co-or- dinate efforts in mobile-related work in The GNOME Mobile software platform the GNOME platform. We have had se- has advanced greatly this year from so- veral meetings this year - in Austin, Te- me key contributions. This year, everyo- xas during the Linux Foundation ne benefited from the work which was Collaboration Summit, during GUADEC done by Tommi Komulainen and others in Istanbul, and again at the Boston in the Nokia team in getting their perfor- Summit in October - and myself, Stormy mance fixes, and a major new feature in- Peters and Paul Cooper have been tal- put method, released in the standard king regularly with participants to try to GTK+ release. Nokia has also been figure out how we can get high quality pushing to get work which was done in development and co-operation, focused integrated into GTK+ where it is on mobile and embedded platforms. useful. During the year, Tommi left No- kia, and joined litl, a new company whi- We have made great progress in the ch is working on GNOME based past couple of years, and the value of technologies - among the work which litl the platform has proven itself. GNOME have released this year is Gjs ("Gee- has been good at attacking problems jays"), GNOME Javascript bindings. This from top to bottom, and addressing pro- work should enable easlier integration blems at every level of the platform from of web-based content into GNOME. Bob the kernel through Xorg right up to the

18 user interface. To address the specific needs of mobile applications in terms of performance, power management and memory usage, all of the GNOME Mobi- le participants will need to apply this sa- me thinking to the GNOME stack.

Using existing GNOME technologies, GNOME Mobile is a project to make GNOME technologies effective for mobi- le devices. GNOME Mobile provides the infrastructure for discussing the needs of mobile technologies and making chan- ges to technologies in order to support mobile solutions. GNOME Mobile mem- bers include individuals working on GNOME te- chnologies to companies providing mobile solu- tions built on them.

Roll on 2009.

19 Interview with Willie Walker Willie Walker is the GNOME Accessibility Project leader. Dave Neary interviewed Willie about the state of Accessibility technologies in GNOME and the GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility.

Can you describe yourself & what you do for GNOME a little? These days, I'm focused mostly on the Orca screen reader project, but I'm also I've been working on Accessibility for ne­ acting as the person to help coordinate arly 20 years, with all of that being focu­ and organize accessibility activities sed on platforms using the X Windows across GNOME. It's a very busy job. System. Some of the early work I did was to develop AccessX in collaboration Can you explain what accessibility is, with Mark Novak at the TRACE Center. and why it's important to GNOME AccessX, which is still in use today and is users? now part of the XKB standard, provides keyboard enhancements (StickyKeys, Our main goal with accessibility is to SlowKeys, RepeatKeys, etc.) for people make a platform where people with di­ with physical impairments. In the very sabilities have equal and compelling ac­ early 1990's, I also helped create the first cess to the graphical desktop. This is service oriented architecture for accessi­ important for many reasons, the most bility, RAP (the Remote Access Prototol). important of which is that it is the right This work was done in collaboration thing to do. As we see with projects such with Georgia Tech. All of the ideas carri­ as Dogtail, LDTP, and Strongwind, all of ed forward into modern accessibility in­ which use the AT­SPI infrastructure, we frastructure designs such as that seen in also see how the accessibility support the Java Accessibility API (which I hel­ can be much farther reaching. A stale ped create) and the AT­SPI (which was cliche we use to describe this effect is based on the Java Accessibility work). I "electronic curbcuts." In the physical also led two open source projects around world, sidewalks have ramps on them speech ­­ FreeTTS is an open source spe­ that cut through the curb to make a ech synthesis engine and Sphinx­4 is an smooth transition to the street. While open source speech recognition system. these curbcuts were for wheelchairs,

20 they also benefit others such as those pushing strollers.

What exactly are you announcing with the accessibility outreach project, and why do you consider it significant?

The outreach program is a way for com­ munity members to test the accessibility waters by doing their choice of several long term and short term tasks. The long term tasks are on the order of 6 months, and the short term tasks are on the or­ der of 2 weeks. The tasks were chosen by the GNOME accessibility community as being some of the most important work needed and include areas where developers and non­developers alike can participate.

The significance of this effort is that ac­ cessibility is being recognized at the bo­ ard level. When I started working on accessibility 20 years ago, it was always a game of "Mother May I?" and continu­ al negotiation with developers and ma­ nagement. Accessibility was always viewed as that once­in­a­while special interest segment you see on the nightly news ­­ sappy music playing in the back­ ground with the narrator using words such as "bravery," "overcoming hardships" and other content­free ilk meant to focus on the disability and tug at people's heartstrings. 21 daily designs and work, and that we will Over the years, I've seen the mentality get some really important work done in change. There are still those special inte­ the process. rest segments with sappy music narrated by some teary eyed tart, but we're also Can you perhaps give an overview of seeing people making accessible design existing GNOME technology for acces­ part of their normal everyday thinking. sibility, describing what the target au­ People "get it." We see companies like dience is, and how it helps? supporting leadership roles in creating and building accessible [1] is a good spot to start for the target design into platforms such as GNOME. users. The underlying AT­SPI infrastruc­ We see accessibility having an impact on ture, which is used by many of the assis­ the decisions being made to procure and tive technologies, is discussed at [2]. deploy software. We see mainstream de­ velopers incorporate accessibility consi­ From the base platform perspective, derations into their applications. We see GNOME has: increased understanding that it is about independence, efficiency, and producti­ Built in keyboard navigation. This allows vity for everyone. people to use the desktop and its appli­ cations without needing the mouse. This So, "GNOME Outreach Program: Accessi­ is very important for users who cannot bility" represents more exposure to more use the mouse. people, especially people who will "get it" and have the ability to make a diffe­ AccessX keyboard enhancements. Acces­ rence. sX features allow people to use the key­ board who may not otherwise be able to What results are you expecting from do so. For example, the StickyKeys fea­ the initiative? ture of AccessX allows people who can only type with one finger to do chording I'm expecting that accessibility aware­ operations such as logically holding ness will grow within the community, down a modifier while pressing another that we will get more developers to inclu­ key. de accessibility considerations in their [1] http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/Users [2] http://live.gnome.org/GAP/AtkGuide 22 Theming. The theming support of GNO­ speech, braille, and magnification, ME allows people to select the default users can access the desktop through fonts, colors, etc. Built into GNOME are non­visual means. themes for people with visual impair­ ments who might need themes such as • MouseTweaks ­ MouseTweaks is high contrast and large print. new for GNOME 2.22 and is for peo­ ple who have pointer manipulation Assistive technologies. When the base devices. The main application provi­ platform support above is not enough, as­ des dwell­clicking (i.e., you hover sistive technologies provide additional the pointer over something for a pe­ means for interacting with the desktop. riod of time) which simulates diffe­ These include: rent mouse clicks without using physical buttons and a delay­click fe­ • GOK ­ the GNOME Onscreen Keybo­ ature which opens context menus by ard. GOK provides people with the holding the left mouse button for a ability to interact with the desktop specified amount of time. via devices such as switches (e.g., a user can make some movement to There are definitely areas for improve­ open/close a switch) and/or pointer ment, such as better support for learning manipulation devices (e.g., the user disabilities. The Orca team is currently has hardware to allow them to turn investigating features to incorporate into head movements into mouse pointer Orca to help with this. These features in­ movements on the screen). clude highlighting text as it is being spo­ ken, providing the ability to speak the • Dasher ­ Dasher is a predictive text word under the pointer, allowing the entry tool for people who have poin­ speech output to be customized more for ter manipulation devices. With the visual user, etc. Dasher, we find that people are able to enter text at speeds much higher rates than they otherwise would be able to.

• Orca ­ Orca is a screen reader for people with visual impairments. Th­ rough customizable combinations of 23 GNOME around the world Around the world, GNOME users and developers gather together in their own communities to spread the word about our project. Here is a quick look at some of their activities from 2008.

Spain miento Libre.

Grouped under the GNOME Hispano um­ As you might know, in 2009 GNOME Hispa­ brella, Spanish users and developers have no will be, for the third time, supporting had a great year of activities and were re­ the GUADEC organization since the next cognized for their efforts. We began the ye­ yearly GNOME meeting will be held in ar with the 5th GUADEC­ES (the Spanish Gran Canaria, together with the an­ version of GUADEC) which was held in Fu­ nual KDE conference, . enlabrada at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos on July 3­4. Sixty users and developers we­ Brazil re present to discuss topics from innovation to developing with GNOME libraries. Being the biggest country in Latin America, the work of GNOME Brazil is not easy. Later on, the Polinux user group from Valen­ cia invited GNOME Hispano, for the second In April, GNOME Brazil was present in FISL time, to collaborate on the organization of ­ the biggest free software conference in La­ GUADEMY (a joint conference for Spanish tin America. As always, the GNOME booth GNOME and KDE developers). The confe­ was raided by people wanting to join the rence attendees included hackers from outsi­ community by helping or learning more de Spain and is shaping up to be a big event about the project. for project coordination and collaboration. During the year, Jorge Pereira and Jonh During its many years of existence, the Wendell, among others, travelled th­ group has been recognized and awarded for roughout Brazil giving talks and workshops their many achievements. This year they re­ on GNOME topics. Vicente Aguiar presen­ ceived a bunch more: the Navegantes de ted an interesting article about the GNOME Hoy award given by spanish internet users Project for the 13th National Association of and the Iniciativa Focus' Awards to Conoci­ Research in Administration Meeting.

24 part of the community. This growth speaks well of the health of our community.

The number of FLOSS­related conferences has grown in the last year in Chile. GNOME Chile was represented at almost all of them with speakers and/or a booth.

In March, a group of Chilean contributors were kindly invited as speakers to the event Involucrate+, which was held in Lima, Pe­ To close the year of activities, hackers and ru. It was a great opportunity to spread the contributors from Brazil and some others word about the GNOME project, share ex­ from Latin America met in Foz do Iguaçu periences, and meet developers and enthu­ for the Fifth Fórum GNOME held in Lati­ siasts from different places and projects. noware 2008. It was one of the stops in the GNOME Latin America Tour. GNOME Bra­ In April, GNOME Chile participated in the zil's hero Izabel Valverde was crucial for co­ Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de ordinating with Latinoware to bring more Software Libre (Santiago, Curicó, and Con­ GNOME contributors from around the conti­ cepción) with talks about the project and nent to the conference. how to get involved in both Free Software development and the GNOME Community. This year the Brazilian translation team saw improvements in their workforce and work­ In September, contributors from different flow thanks to new volunteers and new to­ cities across the country gave talks about ols. And to top all, there are a bunch of GNOME during Freedom Software Day. proud Brazilians that just joined the Founda­ tion: Vladimir Melo, Licio Fonseca, Fábio In October, GNOME Chile had a booth at Nogueira and Leonardo Fontenelle. the main Linux Conference in Chile (9º En­ cuentro Linux), and also gave several talks Chile about GNOME as preamble of the Día de GNOME (GNOME Day). During 2008, GNOME Chile grew as a com­ munity. People who attended GNOME In 2008, the GNOME Day ­­part of Latin events were not only attendants; they felt American Tour­­ was held in the beautiful 25 city of Concepción. It was a great event, zil, to give talks in the Fórum do GNOME with the happiness in the air. It was not which was en event part of Latinoware and only a chance to meet new people, sharing Latin American Tour. experience, knowledge, and motivation, but also to discover new gems in the commu­ Perú nity and, last but not least, the beginning of new contributors of the Spanish translation Trying to foster the involvement of new team. contributors to free software projects, the team of Involucrate.org asked the Foundati­ It was a progressive conference, starting on for the chance to have a meeting of with talks about community and getting in­ GNOME hackers and contributors in early volved in different projects (art, translation, March at Lima. bugsquad, development), but also with small talks given by newcomers in GNOME The event gathered a good number of vo­ Chile and finishing with more technical and lunteers, attendees, and local hackers from specific topics. other projects and was a great place to me­ et and discuss different projects and ideas. At the end of October, a couple of Chilean contributors traveled to Foz do Iguaçu, Bra­ Later on during the year, two new GNOME

26 contributors, Sergio Infante and Juan Rojas, started to meet to work together in bug tria­ ging, translations and patching. Still on the first stages of formation, they are already planning to have frequent meetings to hack together and help others join the commu­ nity.

GNOME Latin America Tour

Planned since the beginning of the year, hac­ kers from Perú, Chile, and Brazil crafted a project to spread the word about GNOME around the continent in all the big conferen­ ces they could find. This year they arranged big meetings during October: Encuentro Li­ activity on the right foot. Ranked as one of nux and Día GNOME in Chile, and Lati­ the top three FOSS conferences in China by noware and Fórum GNOME in Brazil. its government for 2008, the summit has al­ ready created a lot of expectancy for its Thanks to the Foundation's support and lo­ next edition which will be held in India. cal communities' coordination with the orga­ nizers of Encuentro Linux and Latinoware, The Beijing group, known as the Beijing­ we were able to travel contributors to meet, GUG, meet every month to chat about their plan and... party :­). favorite desktop. They train each other to get involved in GNOME with an internal Because there is no better way to get closer mentor­student program where Accessibi­ to each other than trying to survive in fo­ lity related projects are getting a special fo­ reign countries or new cities, lots of new fri­ cus. endships and planning took place, from which we hope will bear fruit soon. Belgium, & Switzerland

China The GNOME­FR community was active in various events during the year, with booths Hosting the first ever GNOME.Asia summit, at Solutions Linux in January (Paris), at the the Chinese GNOME community started its RMLL in July (Mont de Marsan), and the 27 JDLL in October (Lyon), among others. Due fically about the "GNOME Outreach Pro­ to popular demand, some stickers were prin­ gram: Accessibility" initiative, explaining ted for Solutions Linux and given away, and the various issues related to accessibility of course some t­shirts were available for pe­ and why accessibility should get more visi­ ople. bility. The organizers recognized this effort from GNOME and rewarded the project Many talks were also delivered during these with the award for the best community­dri­ conferences: Dave Neary explained what ac­ ven effort. cessibility is and how GNOME is working on this topic during the RMLL and the While not a French­speaking event, FOS­ JDLL; Frederic Peters organized a workshop DEM (Brussels, in February) has a special during the JDLL to introduce people to the place in the heart of many GNOME­FR GNOME development process; Dodji Sekete­ members. That is why the GNOME presen­ li presented the debugger at the ce there was mainly prepared by GNOME­ JDLL; and Vincent Untz gave an in­depth re­ FR. The event itself was handled by the view of the release management in GNOME whole community, with people from many to RMLL attendees. different countries manning the GNOME booth. With a widely acclaimed t­shirt in­ GNOME­FR also applied for the Lutèce d'Or troducing the GNOME equation, the booth award, which is organized as part of Paris attracted many people. Also, available were Capitale du Libre. The application was speci­ some small white and black GNOME bad­ ges. The devroom had a full schedule of talks, which were well­received by the au­ dience. Also this FOSDEM was the first one to see a GNOME Beer Event organized on Saturday evening: all the GNOME commu­ nity that was in Brussels went there to dis­ cuss a wide range of topics, and was joined by many other FOSDEM attendees.

India

The Indian community had a special year for l10n, taking the Kannada language from 8% to 75% and Marathi to 97%. GNOME 28 was present with talks and a workout pro­ ject (Profiling GNOME with DTrace) at Some Italian hackers and people from all FOSS.IN, India's biggest Free Software con­ around the world met and got the opportu­ ference. Also a hackfest was held at nity to work together at the SpeckHackFest FOSSKriti, together with some talks and ge­ prior to the South Tyrolean Free Software neral GNOME presence. Conference. The topic of the hackfest was Cairo, while the SFSCon closed the week Looking forward to 2009, the Indian team with general public talks, concentrating on is preparing translation sprints for Indic lan­ promotion and spreading the word about guages to increase GNOME outreach. free software. The hackfest was kindly put together by Daniel Siegel, the maintainer of Turkey Cheese.

Putting together a big number of volunteers In the old and charming city of London, and ideas, GNOME Turkey held the annual GNOME users and developers held a good GNOME meeting, GUADEC, in the beautiful number of meetings to get to know each city of Istanbul. GUADEC 2008 was really other and discuss their favourite desktop. cool, as every year, and the GUADEC team While you can't just live from having beers made sure everyone had a great time. with your fellow GNOMErs, they took care Thanks to all the people that helped the or­ of the GNOME booth at Linux Live Expo in ganization, GUADEC 2008 was a huge suc­ London, which ran for 3 days, spreading cess! the word and ­even better­ the cool feeling of being part of the GNOME community. Germany, Italy, & Nether­ lands The GNOME­NL team had a lot of translati­ on work done this year, having two Dutch This year, Berlin was the scenario for the vertaalspurt (translation sprint). The result GTK+ hackfest where hackers from all of this work is a very healthy Dutch transla­ around Europe and the world got together tion of your favorite desktop. to discuss the future of GTK+ and other te­ chnologies. Among the biggest results was the draft of the GTK+ 3.0 roadmap, which is now slowly materializing into something concrete.

29 Foundation Finances The GNOME Foundation collects donations from companies and individuals and spends the money on developing the GNOME desktop, development platform, and mobile technologies.

Income Advisory Board Members $110,000 Sponsorship for programs and In 2008, the GNOME Foundation raised events $160,344 roughly $290,000, over 90% of which came Friends of GNOME $6843 from our corporate sponsors. As we move in to Royalties $68 2009, we are hoping to diversify our revenue Interest $3664 stream, starting with a new Friends of GNOME GUADEC registration $5670 program that allows people to subscribe to support GNOME for $10/month. We encourage The sponsorship for programs and events was GNOME fans to sign up for this program, primarily for GUADEC, the Accessibility especially as the economy is affecting our Outreach Program, Google Summer of Code corporate sponsor´s ability to give more. and the GTK+ hackfest.

2008 income came from the Our income breaks down by sponsoring following sources: company in the following way. This chart does not include GUADEC sponsorship. Also note

30 that some of our sponsoring companies gave We spent our income helping bring existing quite a bit directly to events, like Nokia fully developers together to plan for the future of funded a hackfest. GNOME, introduce GNOME to new developers and to meet with users. Of particular significance in 2008 was the GTK+ hackfest and Accessibility outreach program. We believe they delivered significant value to the GNOME project and community. Also in 2008, we had our first ever GNOME.Asia which not only sparked GNOME efforts in Asia but also ended up with a surplus of their own to start planning GNOME.Asia 2009.

Most of our budget is spent on conferences, travel for developers to conferences, and staff salaries.

Access $10000.00 Our spending in 2008 breaks Canonical $20000.00 down as follows: Google $30000.00 IBM $10000.00 Intel $10000.00 Motorola $5000.00 Nokia $10000.00 Novell $10000.00 Red Hat $13000.00 Sun Microsystems $10000.00 Igalia $5000.00 Imendio $5000.00 OpenedHand $5000.00 Mozilla $10000.00

Expenses

31 Conferences $94315.64 Payroll Expenses $74733.96 Travel $39063.81 Taxes $15681.37 Losses $10000.00 Lodging $7556.20 Professional Fees $4795.35 Dining $3119.53 Printing and Reproduc. $2651.83 Insurance $2587.48 Bank Service Charge $2382.42 Postage and Delivery $1981.39 Donation Gift Purchases $1670.87 Equipment Rental $517.50 Office Supplies $391.62 Publicity $383.40 Equipment $103.46 Miscellaneous $100.00 Outside Services $50.00

While we are hoping to grow our revenue significantly in 2009 in order to expand our efforts on both the mobile space and new developer and user outreach, the economy might affect new sponsors' ability to join our Foundation as well as existing sponsors´ ability to fund more events.

The GNOME Foundation also has a surplus that we intend to start spending in 2009 at the advice of our accountant. We are also hoping to raise significantly more money from new sponsors, our Friends of GNOME program and grants.

32 2008 Donors These generous people have donated to the Friends of GNOME program during 2008.

33 34 Perhaps more than anything else, GNOME is a worldwide community of volunteers who hack, translate, design, QA, and generally have fun together. www.gnome.org e r v i l o : n g i s e D n e u Y a n n a

Free (as in freedom) Pictures: s o

The cover picture is a Johannes Freund photograph. R :

The love tree is a version of "Love is natural I" by Marina A.J. (aka Shekynah). w e i v

The flower with a bee is "collects honey" by su neko. e r ­ The Maemo device is a version of "Maemo devices" by Kai Hendry. t x e

All others are cool GNOME Community photographs. T a h c o R s

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