We will present ZeMarmot at OpenTechSummit in Berlin on Thursday May 14, at 10:55 AM.
If you are around, come and see us!
Promote a Libre Movie during the International Day against DRM… and after!
Today is the International #DayAgainstDRM.
Digital Right Managements (systems preventing you from copying a movie or a song you bought, print an ebook you paid… and sometimes even read these!) are a real nuisance and we should fight them. But we believe here that fighting only is not enough. We should also propose constructive alternatives, new ways to produce, share and enjoy media and arts.
ZeMarmot is such an alternative: an animation film under Creative Commons BY-SA, which you can download and share at will. 
There won’t ever be any DRM in any ZeMarmot copy since it would be a design inconsistency. Our licence allowing (even encouraging) to share, it is indeed opposite by design.
So what better way to get rid of DRMs than contributing to Libre movies? Show the world that movies can be produced without harmful restriction! Contribute to ZeMarmot (by going to our crowdfunding!) and/or any other¹ Libre Art projet that you may like!
And if you can’t, spreading the word is good too. 🙂
Also such a day is a good reminder of all problems brought by DRM but to reach real results, don’t limit your contributions to Libre Art projects to this specific day of course!
¹ We met recently, during Libre Graphics Meeting, Matt Lee from the Creative Commons Foundation who is also producing and funding a personal project of feature film (not animation), which looks very funny, and of course also under Creative Commons BY-SA (like ZeMarmot). This seems like another good Libre funding target if you don’t like animation. Of course if you can fund both, you would be even more awesome! 😉
Our Open Animation Film crowdfunding has been launched!
So we just launched the crowdfunding for our 2D animation film, “ZeMarmot”!
You’ll find a small 1-minute teaser there. We hope you’ll like it.
As already explained, it will be made fully with Free Software, even the music as we work with a collective of musicians working with Free Software as well, and it will be released under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (double licensed Free Art).
What not to like?
To know more and support us, go get a look to the crowdfunding page!
Hello planet GNOME!
As a GNOME foundation member, I (Jehan) got this log subscribed to planet GNOME a few days ago. So I figured I might as well make a small “hello” message to present myself. 🙂
I am mostly here as a GIMP developer. For full disclosure, though I regularly use GNOME 2, I never “really” used GNOME 3 (I actually really want to try it but my current distribution is not very GNOME 3-friendly unfortunately). Also I regularly change desktops and window managers anyway.
My main contributions to GNOME projects, other than GIMP itself, are related to me hacking on GIMP.
If I have to cite my patch on GTK+ I am the happiest about, it is probably one most people will never hear about nor notice, since it is GTK+ 2-only. But still I want to believe it changed the life of many GIMP or MyPaint users! Indeed with no hotplug available before GTK+ 3, when unplugging a graphic tablet, a GTK+ 2 application was crashing! Since MyPaint and GIMP are used by a lot of people drawing with a tablet, this was a very very embarrassing and silly issue, also very bad (crash means data loss, and hand-drawn data is usually not perfectly reproducible). Since waiting for the switch to GTK+ 3 (an ongoing process but due in 2 major GIMP releases!) was not a suitable option to me, I worked around the bug, and at least GTK+ does not crash anymore.
When we started using Exiv2 through GExiv2, I helped their migration to autotools, allowing the project to be easily cross-compiled, which soon became a project under GNOME umbrella itself.
I have also various patches in babl, GEGL, pango, and other non-GNOME project like fontconfig, gettext or even autoconf itself, all of these contributions as a consequence of me hacking on GIMP.
Finally I have quite a list of bug fixes and features on GIMP itself of course, but I won’t list them all here.
For more details about various of my contributions to Free Software, and not only GIMP-related, this OpenHub page about myself is not exhaustive but gives a good overview.
In the end, I hack on software not only because I like this, but also because I need these as a user, or for other users, and I prefer to do things by myself rather than wait for someone else doing these when this is important to me. Therefore why I initially started hacking on GIMP was to help Aryeom, and now we are able together to start our project of a film animation fully with Free Software.
I still remember that the first times that I showed GIMP to Aryeom, it would crash for no good reason (for instance because the USB cable of her tablet would sometimes be loose and unplug for a hundredth of second, yet enough time for an X error to occur and crash GTK+, as explained above). So I was so happy when I could fix this crash and other instabilities. Obviously I am far from alone. Mitch in particular, GIMP maintainer, still does 100 times what I do, and without him, GIMP would not be where it is now. I am quite happy to bring my little stone to build this huge and wonderful bazaar which is GIMP, and I sure hope I will be able to continue to do so for years and years!
Finally I’ll conclude by writing about our project of animation film, since I think it could be a major cogwheel to my world domination plan! ZeMarmot could be the first 2D animation film made fully with Free Software and released as Creative Commons BY-SA. I don’t believe it to be an easy goal, but I am helped with Aryeom, a very skilled animation artist, AMMD, a collective of very good Libre Art musicians, other artists, developers, Free Software or Libre Art supporters, and a lot of friends who want to see it happen too. So let’s get it realized!
And that’s it, for who I am! At least a little part of who I am, since as anybody else, how can you sum a person up in one blog post?! But enough to hope I get you interested.
Hello world planet GNOME!