Several things are happening in the Gnome project lately, and I would like to comment some of them:
- “The Program for Gnome Foundation” e-mail sent recently to the Gnome Foundation lists by Anne Østergaard on behalf of the GNOME Foundation Board reveals an interesting “new” approach: take care of the community we _already_ have, improve the collaboration among the participants, get more people involved inside the Foundation, more local communities, more events. I completely agree with the idea and like to see the board working in that direction.
- I have been having a look to the GUADEC 2006 Sponsor’s brochure, and it looks very interesting. Quim and Javi are looking for sponsors, so if you want to have a place in one of the world most important Desktop oriented conferences, contact them.
- In about 3 weeks Gnome 2.14 will be released. I think this idea of the fixed release schedule is one of the better decisions that have been taken in the project in the last years. New features will include more speed and better memory usage; new administration programs (like the lockdown editor for reducing Gnome functionality or Sabayon, a powerful tool for setting default and mandatory desktop configurations for groups of users); better search facilities in the Desktop, including integration with Beagle; a lot of new functionality in Ekiga (the new Gnome Meeting); several improvements in Metacity, a very renewed GEdit and other nice things that are explained with a lot of detail in the traditional article from Davyd Madeley A look at Gnome 2.14.
- Banshee, the music player developed by Novell using Mono technologies is getting more and more popular. Recently it has being included as default music player in the last releases of openSUSE. It is well integrated with iPod like devices and most importantly it has a very good plugin for Audioscrobbler 🙂 You can learn more about the program in this article from Linux.com.
- Jon Trowbridge, the creator of Beagle inside Novell (I liked a lot his talk in Stuttgart about the project), is now working for Google in his Open Source Program Office. The Beagle project is now maintained by Joe Shaw. Is Jon going to work in Gnome from Google? It seems it is still not clear, according to what he says in this interesting interview.