After first being discussed at the GUADEC conference back in July last year, the GNOME project is moving forward on its plans for GNOME 3.0, with a new user interface planned.

At the recent GNOME User and Developer European Conference (GUADEC), the GNOME release team announced a proposal for developing the next major iteration of the open source desktop environment. The plan offers a long-term strategy for moving GNOME development forward and defining future goals for the desktop.

Back in July of 2008 we learned of GNOME 3.0 as plans were laid out during the GUADEC '08 conference to make the GNOME 2.30 release their "3.0" version in March of 2010. However, it looks like GNOME 3.0 may not hit in H1'2010 but rather September of next year.

First of all, I think that the GNOME project is in a really strange place right now. Others called it “decadence” but I’ve been thinking of it more as a state of transition. Things are changing in GNOME and I think that it’s largely just a reflection of time. GNOME has been around for more than a decade. Leadership is changing. GNOME is evolving into something else.

It's been a rough road, but it seems as if KDE 4.1 is showing signs of the vision becoming a reality. And it now seems as if several people within the GNOME community are seeing the writing on the wall too: GNOME 2.x has reached its goal - now what?

Mandriva announces a similar program for the GNOME conference, GUADEC 2007, which is taking place in Birmingham from July 15th to July 21st. Again, as well as sponsoring the conference, Mandriva is arranging to provide special edition Mandriva Flash USB keys to developers attending the conference as a token of appreciation for their work.

Today at GUADEC I presented the results of the GNOME Census, a project we have been working on for a while. For as long as I have been involved in GNOME, press, analysts, potential partners and advisory board members have been asking us: How big is GNOME?

GNOME's Epiphany web browser recently gained support for rendering HTML with WebKit. The patch for WebKit support in Epiphany—which was experimentally implemented at the GNOME GUADEC conference—is now available for testing.

"Licenses are in the news everywhere this month. The SLFC takes on Verizon for violating the GPL. The FSF releases the Affero GPL and a handy new guide to the GPLv3. The FSF, Creative Commons, and the Wikipedia Foundation agree to make the GFDL compatible with the CC BY-SA. GNOME is the other big newsmaker. A new GNOME Journal, a D-Bus debugger, GUADEC video, GNOME Foundation elections, and GNOME news about FOSDEM 2008. All the usual topics are covered as well..."