GIMP 2.8 Released

  By Articles, FLOSS, Imaging, OSS

We are happy to announce immediate availability of GIMP 2.8—a new stable version of GNU Image Manipulation Program that culminates 3.5 years of exciting work.

With this version we are introducing some long-anticipated features such as layer groups, on-canvas text editing, advanced brush dynamics and the much desired optional single-window mode. We also started applying other important changes to the user interface that bring us closer to matching the product vision.

For detailed information about changes since 2.6 please read the release notes. Source code is available for downloading from a plethora of mirrors, a build for Windows will soon be available, and we hope to see a build for Mac OS X released as well.

We’d like to thank everyone who participated in development of GIMP 2.8: programmers, translators, documentation writers (updated user manual is a work in progress), and testers. We also thank our user community for the dedication and support—we needed it more than ever.

Now that this version is finally released, we are grasping the future with both hands. Stay tuned: some really exciting news will follow.

GIMP and GEGL Projects for GSoC2012 Announced

  By Articles, FLOSS, Imaging, OSS

We are excited to announce that we have five students to work with us on improving GIMP as part of the Google Summer of Code 2012 program. All the students will be contributing to faster transition of GIMP to GEGL, our new advanced image core.

The projects are:

  • Maxime Nicco and hanslo will port GIMP filters to GEGL operations.
  • Ville Sokk will port other GIMP features to GEGL.
  • Isaac Wagner will create a GEGL-based node compositor that will serve as playground for GEGL development.
  • Mikael Magnusson will create a Unified Transform tool.

In the past years Google Summer of Code has proven to be a great source of contributions. We wish our students success and, above all, a lot of fun while making GIMP a state of the art image editor.

Is the Internet Becoming Less Open? | WebProNews

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Is the Internet Becoming Less Open? | WebProNews.

Although the issue of Web openness has been mostly quiet of late, it was revived after Google’sSergey Brin made some powerful statements to the Guardian. According to him, the freedom of the Internet is under a greater threat than it has ever been before.

“I am more worried than I have been in the past,” he tells the Guardian. “It’s scary.”

Brin also indicated that he and fellow Google co-founder Larry Page would not be able to build their search engine in the current Internet environment given restrictive players such as Facebook. He categorized both Facebook and Apple as “walled gardens” saying they have too many limitations within their services.

As one can imagine, Brin’s statements have gained a considerable amount of criticism. What’s more, his perspective has also reignited the debate over what true openness actually is and what real threats lie with it.

Google Reveals its Open Source Networking | WebProNews

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Google Reveals its Open Source NetworkingGoogle announced this week that it has overhauled its internal networking infrastructure to reduce costs and increase efficiency. To do this, Google is using a software-defined, open source networking system called OpenFlow. The OpenFlow protocol allows network packets to be routed by software running on routers. By separating packet switching from network management, Google has better and easier control over their network.

 

Source and full article at: Google Reveals its Open Source Networking | WebProNews.

GIMP’s Core Getting Ported to GEGL

  By Articles, FLOSS, Imaging, OSS

In late 2007 we launched smooth transition to GEGL—a new advanced image processing core incepted by a team of Rhythm & Hues developers.

For v2.6 we made an optional GEGL-based implementation of color adjustment tools, and for upcoming v2.8 we implemented optional projection rendering via GEGL. But nobody really had evaluated the amount of the work to be done in order to finalize this transition. Until just now.

Five weeks ago Michael Natterer and Øyvind Kolås decided to finally work out the migration strategy. While working on that they found themselves doing the actual porting. So now about 90% of the GIMP application’s core has been ported to GEGL. When finished, this will be released as GIMP 2.10 along with some other improvements yet to be decided on.

GEGL is quite an exciting project that will make it possible to implement some long anticipated features in a clean, non-sloppy way: high bit depth image processing and deep painting, non-destructive editing, a wider choice of color spaces to work in, mipmaps processing for faster perceived editing etc. This will be the focus of our future work after release of v2.10, along with further user interface improvements thanks to collaboration with Peter Sikking and his team at Man+Machine Works.

Now that we passed the point of no return with regards to GIMP and GEGL, we encourage you to join us and help porting the rest of GIMP. We’d really like to finish the boring part as soon as possible and start new exciting developments where we’d also need your support.

We also encourage you to support Libre Graphics Meeting 2012 where developers of GIMP and other teams such as Scribus, Inkscape and Blender meet to align development strategies.

NASA’s Open-Source Open Government Future | TechPresident

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NASA chose its website as flagship for a revamp of its open government plan rolled out yesterday, and — as if to show the agency meant business — did so with a brand-new, brightly colored buzzword-catcher of a website.

There are two things worth noting here. First, NASA — which, seeing as it has its own cloud computing environment, is on the leading edge of government IT already — is making the case that accessibility through web design and funcitonality will be important for open government. Second, the agency promises a full-scale reorientation in how it chooses technology. NASA’s new goals include a transition to an open-source content management system and change its procurement process to value open-source over proprietary solutions. This in a federal government that wasn’t clear on how to treat open-source software until 2009.
Reproduced from: NASA’s Open-Source Open Government Future | TechPresident.

Social Security Updates Open Government Plan, Highlights the Crowd, FOIA, Open Source | FedScoop

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On how open source software will play a role in the agency’s ongoing open government efforts the plan states, “We continue to test open-source software solutions and incorporate open-source business rules engines in several production applications. In addition, we established an enterprise service bus based on open-source technology and continue to incorporate open-source solutions in our integrated development environments … We look forward to sharing the products of our open-source platform efforts across the growing Federal open-source development community, as well as partnering with other agencies in future endeavors.”

 

Taken from: Social Security Updates Open Government Plan, Highlights the Crowd, FOIA, Open Source | FedScoop.

Open source collaboration Summit

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From Facebook to the New York Stock Exchange, the Linux foundation successfully hosted the ultimate Open Source collaboration summit
” “Wall Street Won’t share the wealth but it will share the code” – NYSE

After receiving a briefing from MITA and MARSEC-XL, I hopped over to London followed by a long-haul flight to the west coast, finally arriving in Silicon Valley a day later.

Today, in downtown San Francisco the 6th Linux collaboration summit got off to a great start with an exceptional key note from Jim Zemlin the Executive Director of the Linux foundation. He showcased how Linux and its kernel is dominating all domains, ranging from desktops to enterprise servers, with 850,000 android phones being registered on a daily basis in comparison to the 30,000 windows phones. Since 2005, 8000 developers have contributed to the Linux kernel, resulting in 15 million lines of code, proving that the Linux project is the World’s largest collaboration software project.”

 

“All the tools and resources are out there it’s up to us to recognise the benefits and utilise them to our own needs.

OSS within the Government of Malta is governed by the Open Source Software Policy and related Directive. The website of the Government of Malta IT Agency, MITA offers a specific section on OSS which establishes a number of key principles as well as sets a number of immediate and long term objectives intended to take the application of open source software within Government to the next phase.

Zak Borg is a MARSSA project Lead, MARSEC-XL, reporting live from Silicon Valley”

Source: INDEPENDENT online.

GEGL and babl Updated, GIMP 2.8rc1 Released

  By Articles, FLOSS, Imaging, OSS

We released new versions of GEGL and babl, quickly followed by the first release candidate of GIMP 2.8.

GEGL 0.2.0 has some major improvements and breaks API/ABI compatibility with earlier versions for some very good reasons.

Perhaps the most exciting change in GEGL is an initial support for GPU-side rendering and processing via OpenCL. Hardware acceleration makes it possible to leverage many operations to GPUs which can dramatically improve performance.

The foundation for this feature was laid by Jerson Michael Perpetua as the primary objective of his GSoC2009 project. The second part of the project was done by Victor Oliveira during GSoC2011. Victor was also sponsored by AMD to finish the project this winter, with help from GEGL team, Zhang Peixuan and his team from Multicore Ware. Currently you need to run GEGL_USE_OPENCL=yes to use this.

Two new essential operations were contributed to GEGL. Mikael Magnusson implemented perspective transformation, and Jan Rüegg submitted a global matting operation that would be required for a GEGL-based foreground selection tool.

Since this version GEGL also supports internationalization. The final patches for that were delivered by Michael Muré. Translations into German, French, Polish, Russian, Slovenian and Spanish languages are available, and we expect more to follow. Users of GIMP 2.8 will see this in the experimental GEGL operation tool.

The changes in GIMP 2.8rc1 since 2.7.5 are mostly not user-visible. We merely updated the code to work with newer versions of GEGL and babl, fixed GFig rendering issues and used all the translation updates we got to the point. There is still time to review your translations and submit updates, although probably not too much of it.

Please use the Downloads section to fetch source code of GIMP 2.8rc1 and visit gegl.org for source code of GEGL and babl. Let us know if you run into serious regressions that haven’t been reported yet.