Newsletter

Sovereign Tech Fund invests €203,000 in GStreamer After investing €1M in GNOME, the Sovereign Tech fund also decided to finance the development of the “general multimedia processing framework” GStreamer. The goal, according to the Fund, is to “Re-implement a multimedia framework’s low-level network protocol for increased security, maintainability, and sustainability”. The Fund is quite transparent; in the webpage linked below, you can see why this project was awarded the sum. Even better, a precise list of tasks the SVT is financing is at the bottom of the page. ...

The Linux Foundation makes $262 Million The Linux Foundation has published its yearly activity report: let’s see if there are interesting insights! From a financial point of view, you might be surprised to see how the LF is not just about Linux, which only directly accounts for 2% budget. Instead, most of the expenditures are all about supporting a wide variety of projects in Cloud, Containers & Virtualization, Networking & Edge, AI, ML, Analytics, Web & Application development, … ...

Linux Marketshare at an all-time high! Graph by GamingOnLinux (see link below) I’m happy to report that the Linux market share is at an all-time high according to two reports. Firstly, we have “Statcounter”, whose results over time you can see above. The spike in December 2023 is easy to see, but - even better! - it’s part of a clear positive trend overall. ...

GNOME development is greatly benefiting from the Sovereign Tech Fund The amount of work that’s currently happening in the GNOME projects thanks to the developers hired using the Sovereign Tech Fund is impressive. Firstly, we have Alice working on adaptive bottom sheet resizing (see above video). This allows bottom sheets to stay centered in bigger applications but to move to the bottom and fill the width on smaller ones (e.g. phone apps). We also have Julian working on making the Quick Setting popup scrollable, since it might not fit in the screen of smaller devices. Georges made sure that applications requesting a screenshot of the screen/of an application will use the UI for GNOME Shell screencasting. And these are just a few UI examples: there are lots of other developers (Adrian, Joanie, Ivan, Philip, Tobias) working on more behind-the-scenes features. ...

Nextcloud announces Hub 7 Just a couple of days ago, the Nextcloud project announced a new major version of the project; amongst the new features, we see global search, new AI models to choose from, and more. I have to say: this “global search” seems to be very well implemented. It performs, you guessed it, a global search throughout all Nextcloud (supported) apps, and you can filter by date and people. Even cooler, though, is the fact that you can select which application to search in, and these include integrations such as GitLab, GitHub, OpenStreetMap, PeerTube, Reddit, and so on; this means you can search through all of those projects as well, all in a single search bar. ...

PeerTube v6 announced with Storyboards and Chapters Peertube is a decentralized video platform; its ambitious goal is to be an alternative to closed-source for-profit websites such as YouTube, Twitch, Vimeo, and so on. The latest version includes many quality-of-life improvements, some of which are not available on competing platforms. ...

COSMIC’s Window Arrangement And More We have a new update from the most exciting development saga of Linux! This month, the team has put together various smaller features or details that are required for a full-fledged desktop environment. Let’s start with window arrangement. If tiling is turned off, there’s now a logic that establishes where new windows will open: always near the center of the screen, offset by 48px (or multiples) from the previous window, while also keeping the top-right corner of the window header visible. You can see an example in the screenshot above. Similarly to other desktops, shortcuts to tile windows to the left/right halves of the screen should be implemented as well. ...

Earthquake within OpenAI It’s not easy to explain what has happened in OpenAI in the last few days. When the previous newsletter issue was published, Sam Altman was the CEO; now he isn’t, but the company just said he’ll be right back. On Friday, Sam Altman was removed from the role of CEO by OpenAI’s board. No detailed explanation was given, and the move felt hurried; the CTO, Mira Murati, temporarily took his place. One of the board members, Greg Brockman, resigned in protest. It’s important to point out that, since OpenAI was originally non-profit, the board does not have the goal of maximizing revenue - their goal is to guide the company safely toward its AI future. ...

GNOME gets €1M Funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund The Sovereign Tech Fund is an organization run by two project managers of open-source projects (Adriana Groh and Fiona Krakenbürger) and is financed by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action. They have a budget of ~€11.5M in 2023 to finance the development, improvement, and maintenance of “critical open digital infrastructure”. Selected projects so far include curl, Fortran, OpenSSH, WireGuard, and - now - GNOME. ...

Today is KDE 6 MegaRelease Day Plasma 6 artwork. KDE has decided to release today an alpha of Plasma 6, Frameworks 6, and KDE Gear. Usually, these are different products with different release dates but (given how interdependent KDE 6 development is) the team has decided to release an alpha of everything on the same day (thus the name: MegaRelease). ...