Stormy weather – Stormy Peter’s talks GNOME 3′s release date, open source management & more

Is a lack of women in programming an issue close to your heart?
I wouldn’t say it’s an issue, other than we’re missing half our potential developers. When I think of recruiting women, I think we would have 800 developers instead of 400 developers. I think most of us are concerned that women are not seeing the opportunities. With GNOME, we are going to do an outreach program for women. In our group of summer code internship applications for 2006, none of them were
from women.

How do you find new developers?
Our core GNOME developers tend to stay pretty steady. A lot of developers come to us as students, then get jobs at Red Hat or Novell. We also work with a number of universities. We were approached by the Humanitarian Software project. They had used humanitarian causes to recruit students to computer science through humanitarian projects. They found that they recruited more women than normal. We partnered with them. Students at various universities work on GNOME projects, and we have paid internships.

How would you recommend someone gets started working on GNOME?
I recommend they start with GNOME Love. We have some directions and guidance for how people can get started with GNOME. We even have a list of bugs we feel newcomers can try and fix. You can also join IRC and ask questions There are lots of people there willing to help.

When is GNOME 3 arriving?
GNOME 3 is targeted at March 2011 right now. We’re working on making it easier for users to get their tasks done. And making it easier to launch tasks, and easier to stay focused on what you’re doing.

How do you keep track of everything going on in GNOME?
That’s the hardest thing to do. When you have several thousand people working on it, it’s hard to see what they’re doing. I’m on IRC if people have to find me, and I’m on a gazillion mailing lists. What I do recommend for anyone following GNOME is reading this.

What’s Clutter?
Clutter is not a new user interface, but it really helps make the UI more interactive, more shiny. It’s used a lot by Intel developers, and it’s going to be included with GNOME 3.

What do you like most about GNOME?
The thing I like most about GNOME is the people. I always find it interesting how projects can create a culture like a place or a country. The values are around free software. I remember when I first started as executive director, I noticed most people talking about how things were beautiful. It’s about the whole solution being beautiful. It’s a culture that works really hard, but we party really hard too. There’s lots of social interaction.

What are the big GNOME events coming up?
The next big one will be the Boston summit in November. It’s usually a big event like an unconference, and very developer focused. We also have three or four more internally focused hackfests. We get ten or 20 people at one location and we lock them in a room and they do awesome code. We’re having one on GTK, one on WebKitGTK and one on
developer documentation.

Interesting. We’ve never heard of someone hackfesting documentation.
We think one of the barriers to entry for new developers is the documentation. When you write documentation and you know all the answers, you don’t write it from a newbie’s perspective.

What do you do outside of GNOME?
I work on a bunch of things. I started a non-profit called Kids and Computers, looking at starting computer labs in areas where kids don’t have access to computers. We set up computers with Edubuntu and GNOME. What’s really funny is, the school I went to to help install computers in Mexico, the teachers had never used computers either. The kids were very funny, and would say “where’d that person find that game?” They did it themselves. But the teachers had never even used a mouse or keyboard. The adults were brave.

It made me think about how we should push into the developing world differently. When we’re thinking about Africa, we’re not thinking “no internet, no power.” In Africa, one of the computer labs we set up at a school blew their power.

What’s happening with GNOME in mobile phones?
A lot of the GNOME stuff in the phone market is happening in the middleware space. LiMo just joined the GNOME Foundation. They use GNOME-based technology in their solution, and they started working with GNOME upstream. One of the things we did not want to do is fork GNOME for mobile. When we started thinking about mobile a few years ago, we decided we didn’t want GNOME desktop and GNOME mobile. They’re the same technologies used on the desktop.

What do you think of netbooks? Any drawbacks?
I think netbooks themselves are awesome, but I think they’ve also helped Linux tremendously. Customers weren’t used to using them or using Windows on them. But when they first came out, you couldn’t close some of the GNOME dialogs because they were below the screen.

What’s tough about dealing with people in an open source project?
I think before I started at GNOME, I knew a lot about what we tend to call community management these days, but I’ve learned a lot more about it since. Most people are giving their time for free. If you want to start a new marketing campaign, you can’t just tell people what to do and they just go and do it. I like all the people I work with. People are extremely willing to help. If I send questions, I get answers immediately. But when launching a project like marketing, it takes a bit of work to explain why it’s worth it and to convince people they have the talent to do it.

You can read more interviews from Linux User & Developer here, or see what else features in issue 92…