Discover how the Libreoffice project is working on making it easier to integrate Libreoffice into your application. We will have a close look at how liblibreoffice and tiled rendering help making Libreoffice available for document rendering and format conversion. Also we will see how the new The Document Foundation project the “Document Liberation Project” helps bring importers for proprietary formats into the FOSS world. Last but not least enjoy enjoy news about many new features in the upcoming Libreoffice.

Markus Mohrhard

Markus is a Libreoffice hacker working mostly on Calc and charts. When he is not hacking calc he is implementing new, crazy testing ideas for the Libreoffice project. He currently serves at the Libreoffice Engineering Steering Committee. Apart from his work on Libreoffice he maintains the Libreoffice cppunit version and is a co-maintainer of orcus, ixion and mdds.

GNOME and the free software community are making progress in increasing participation by women, but this progress has only shown the potential for a much larger change. The more people work towards it, the faster we’ll get there. In this talk, I will explain factors that hold women back in technology and discuss the motivation for initiatives for women, whether they are dedicated internships, scholarships, awards, or events. Having a good understanding of why these are needed will help you become an effective advocate. I will share what you can do, even beyond being a mentor and a promoter of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women, to encourage more women to join the communities, local groups, conferences, and companies you are involved with.

Marina Zhurakhinskaya

Marina Zhurakhinskaya works on community outreach and engagement at Red Hat and serves on the boards of the GNOME Foundation and the Ada Initiative. She is passionate about new contributor outreach, working on GNOME’s newcomers and interns initiatives. She organizes the GNOME Foundation’s Outreach Program for Women. About 170 women have so far participated in the program’s remote internships with 31 free software organizations. Prior to her community engagement role, Marina developed software for GNOME.

GOM is a GObject to SQLite DataMapper that simplifies building data rich applications. Developers can use this library to simplify reading and writing from SQLite through a convenient API.

This talk will discuss the basics of getting started with GOM and how to use it in your application. Advanced topics will discuss how to build partially-connected applications that synchronize from a local database.

Christian Hergert

Christian is a database engineer at MongoDB living in San Francisco, California. He can often be found prototyping developer tools, building cars, and driving the California coast.

Traditionally, open source applications are written by developers. Often there’s no designer on the initial team and no time or resources to get designers involved.

In recent years, startups are more and more design minded. Especially for open source projects this means we need to advance our design sense to stay competitive and appeal to people.

In this talk I’ll describe the design process of ownCloud: How designers and developers work together, how we share knowledge and how we are building a design team.

(ownCloud is an open source project for data storage, sync and sharing. It also provides applications for management of calendars, contacts, notes and many more – most of it can be connected with GNOME Online Accounts already.)

Jan-Christoph Borchardt

Jan-Christoph Borchardt is an open source designer. Currently his focus is on ownCloud but he is involved with several other open source web projects. It is important for him to bring more design to open source and more open source to design.

Last year I presented about new development happening in GNOME to make it geo-aware, through geoclue2, geocode-glib and Maps projects. A lot of progress has has been made since then to turn the dream of geo-aware OS into reality and there is a lot to come in near future. This talk will be about satisfying the curiosity of everyone dying to know about our progress and our future plans with these projects.

Zeeshan Ali

Zeeshan Ali is a GNOME developer who works at Red Hat Inc as a software engineer. He has previous worked on GStreamer, GUPnP and Rygel projects and these days focuses on Boxes and all geo-related software, especially Geoclue. He lived in Helsinki for past 8 years but recently moved to London for better climate and vicinity of fellow gnomies.

How can we help free software to get more sustainable, by providing revenue to those who contribute? How can users needing an improvement contribute to it?

Open Funding is a co-funding platform for free software. It aims at providing a sustainable business model to free software development and common good production. The idea is to enable free software users to contribute to projects by funding them feature by feature, creating a long term relationship between a project and its community. It also takes a professional approach to crowdfunding by enabling users to validate the development, thus committing developers to their results.

Sylvain Le Bon

Sylvain has worked in software for almost 10 years, and has never been satisfied with the way the industry deals with the projects and the skills. That’s why he first created Open Initiative, to help organize projects with agility, and then Open Funding, to provide a new business model for free software, fair and sustainable.

This talk aims to provide a high-level overview of interesting things that have happened in and around the GStreamer multimedia framework in the last year or so, especially in relation to the Linux desktop.

It is targetted at application developers, desktop users, and anyone with an interest in GStreamer or multimedia in general.

Topics touched will include new application features and higher-level API, such as the new device discovery and device probing API, OpenGL integration, Stereoscopic Video, the new MPEG-Ts section parsing library, and plans going forward.

Tim Müller and Sebastian Dröge

Tim Müller is a GStreamer developer and maintainer. He recently joined forces with GStreamer legends Jan Schmidt and Sebastian Dröge and started Centricular Ltd, a new Open Source consultancy with a focus on GStreamer, cross-platform multimedia and graphics. Tim lives in Bristol, UK.

Sebastian Dröge is, among other things, a free software developer and one of the GStreamer maintainers and core developers since 2006 and also contributes to many other free software projects. Sebastian works at Centricular providing consultancy services around GStreamer and Free Software in general. He is based near Hanover in Germany.

There’s a constellation of legal constructs that you often hear referred to collectively as “intellectual property law.” That’s a tricky term because it encourages you to think of these three separate legal ideas as more or less the same, even though they’re very different. More importantly, each type of “intellectual property” has different implications for free and open source software developers.

These three concepts were originally designed to provide ownership rights for tangible creations. Software isn’t particularly well-served by any of these mechanisms and so we use different concepts for different parts of our software. Just to make it more confusing, each of these mechanisms has also evolved and expanded over time. If you’ve ever wondered why patents are so tricky when applied to software or how copyright law works, then this the talk for you.

Absolutely none of this is meant to stand in for legal advice. However, your time with a lawyer can be greatly shortened when you have a good grasp of the basic legal concepts going in.

Andrea Casillas

Prior to becoming Director of Linux Defenders at Open Invention Network, Andrea Casillas was a postgraduate fellow at the Institution for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School, Assistant Director of the Center for Information Law and Policy and the Director of Peer To Patent an initiative allowing the public to contribute to the USPTO’s patent examination process. She has a J.D. from New York Law School and a B.S. from Arizona State University. Andrea has presented at various conferences including LinuxCon Europe, LinuxCon North America, FSFE Legal Workshop, Open Source Festival, Google Summer of Code, Peer Review Prior Art Roundtable at WIPO in Geneva and the USPTO, in addition to guest lecturing at various universities.

The core program for this year’s GUADEC conference has been announced. GUADEC is the premier GNOME conference, and is being held in Brno, Czech Republic from August 1st to 8th. A total of 40 talks will be held during the core conference days, as well as 4 keynotes and a number of lightning talk sessions.

The four core conference days will be followed by three days of working events and hacking sessions, which will give the GNOME community an opportunity to work and plan together.
Continue reading →