Its been both an exciting and challenging year for us, this post includes some of the highlights.
Early in the spring Karen Sandler announced her departure* as the Executive Director of the foundation.
The GNOME Asia Summit, an event with a strong community building focus, was this year hosted in Beijing, China. In the end of July the GNOME community gathered for GUADEC in the beautiful city of Strasbourg, France for a week of talks, discussions and hacking.
Several Hackfest’s took place around the world including the first edition of the West Coast Summit where the growing number of GNOME contributors living in Silicon Valley got together. GNOME was also present at great conferences such as FOSDEM and FSCONS.
We saw two stable GNOME releases, 3.12 & 3.14 where the developer experience took leaps forward with many improvements to GTK+ and the introduction of the inspector while the user experience continued to evolve.
Things took an dramatic turn in November when a legal twist with Groupon became public. The case got much media attention, many were upset of how Groupon had acted; GNOME received strong public support.
Thanks to our contributors GNOME will in 2015 continue innovate pushing Free Software forward.
*Karen now serves the foundation as a member of the board