Late because I promised this two days ago but I haven’t had time to write this before (job calls, plus other things), but as now I have an open time before going out with friends (Happy Birthday Sergio 🙂 – this too is late), I’ll try to write something. Especially since seems like there’s Unleashed waiting for this 😉
I think now everybody seen the list of accepted applications that Christel posted (by the way, you can really tell that is an uncommon blog by looking at the color scheme 😛 – no offense Christel 🙂 ). This is actually a post think about what we’re going to do compared to other organisations that are partecipating in Google’s Summer of Code initiative.
KDE also released their projects list, and there you find mostly user-oriented features. I’m really looking forward for Ian’s DAAP support in amaroK, to be able to play my music collection with the iBook finally getting back the only feature missing from OSX; also OpenSync synchronisation with Google Calendar seems to me an intersting thing, as that will finally mean that I can use the calendar, instead of relying on an old school calendar 😛 (now if only RockMan completed synchronisation with my Moto V180, it would be perfect 😉 ).
FFMPEG (sorry forgot the site :?) has also some interesting project, like finally a Free implementation of VC-1 decoder, to play Windows Media Video 3 format without relying on win32codecs (so on platforms other than x86, like AMD64 and PPC that are my main platforms :P)
From our side instead most of the projects are either researches or internal structure reorganisation, like the quality assurance tool and the migration from CVS, that of course will have many effects on our userbase but are not seen directly. For Gentoo/FreeBSD project there are two intersting applications that are the porting on FreeBSD on AMD64 by Daijo and the porting of sandbox by Unleashed, of which mainly the first will have a direct impact on users (sandbox is mostly a QA tool for us).
So what’s the point? There’s not one, it’s just a way to compare the two ways that are being used. Users hasn’t to expect direct fireworks from Summer of Code for Gentoo.. as Patrick said, we are not mainly software developers, we’re software managers. So yes, Google’s Summer of Code will have effects on you all, but not just directly 🙂
Hey Diego, I have already set up a blog about my war against sandbox. Now battling getcwd() madness.
I jokingly said to solar yesterday that I’d do a tips n tricks article for the GWN on how to turn your Gentoo system pink. ;)But yes, I suspect the colourscheme of my blog (and my other websites) may be slightly too much for most people. *smile*
For ppc and amd64, Fluendo have plugins for wmv9 in their beta test. Work very well.