Here's the article. I apologize for the very late submission!
Juan José Sánchez Penas is a member of the GNOME Foundation Advisory
Board where he represents Igalia. He's the Co-founder and member of
Igalia,
an European company specialized in the development of innovative
technologies around Linux, Freedesktop.org, Webkit and GNOME. During the
past 5 years, Igalia has applied its upstream experience to the mobile
market, contributing to open platforms like GNOME Mobile, Maemo, Moblin
or LiMo, and developing many projects for relevant international
companies. At Igalia, Juan José works in tasks related to business
development, group coordination and project management. He is also part
time teacher at UDC since 2001, giving courses related to software
design and programming.
> How did Igalia get started working
on GNOME?
We founded Igalia back in 2001, with the main goal of doing
innovative
free software development. Some of our first clients wanted ad hoc
software for managing their business. As some of us had been
following
with interest what was happening within GNOME, we decided to take some
risks
and build a solution on top of the GNOME technologies.
Things were very different then. We started using GNOME 1.x and while we
were in the middle of the product development, 2.x was released, so we
had to make a huge effort to port everything to the new APIs. In 2002
we
started attending GUADEC, getting more and more involved in the project,
learning a lot, and progressively went from being external consumers of
the
platform to become active contributors to the core components.
> How many people do you have working on GNOME?
We try to grow slowly and organically, and we have high
standards to
ensure
that we keep the company culture, based on workplace democracy and
self-management principles, very strong. We are 40 people in the company
and
leaving aside a small group of people working in web technologies and a
very
small management team, the rest of the company is working with or inside
GNOME, Freedesktop.org, and related technologies.
> Why did you pick the areas/projects that you did to work on?
We try hard to combine strategy and sustainability with selecting
technological challenges that are attractive to our hackers. For
example, we
are investing a lot in WebKitGTK+, as we really think that the synergy
with
web technologies is one of the keys in the future of the desktop and
mobile.
But we are also doing that cause we have a team of people strongly
motivated
to take on that challenge with energy and passion.
> What is the biggest challenge working with both companies and a
free
> software community?
Sometimes we the small open source consultancy companies can be
seen as
working right in the middle of two very different worlds: the evil
empire of
companies wanting to make profit, and the pure and ethically oriented
free
software community. But at the end there are a lot of shared interests
and
huge potential for the win-win. The main challenge is to find the people
in
key roles of big corporations or institutions that really understand how
free software works, the dynamics of the community, and the right way to
approach a project and have influence (as opposed to control) in its
future.
> What is the biggest benefit?
In my opinion the biggest benefit is that bringing powerful
companies to
contribute directly or indirectly to a free software project is a way to
make that project advance faster, and therefore become more useful for
more
people.
> How do you find customers?
We are quite active upstream, and quite specialized, so in
many
cases it is
them who find us. It is becoming more and more common that people
contact us
because they see our contributions to the repository of a project. The
best
marketing for a company like us is to git push cool improvements or
features
to our own projects or projects we contribute to. But of course we also
go
to many commercial conferences and technical forums, where we try to get
closer to companies that could be interested in our services.
> How do you hire people? Do you look for people already contributing
to
> GNOME? Do you ever hire anyone that doesn't already work for GNOME?
This has evolved over the 8 years of company history. Nowadays we
mostly
hire experienced contributors to the free software platforms that we are
most interested in, GNOME being a key one. But we also have hired -and
still
do sometimes- people with a lot of potential to become good hackers.
> What would you like to see the GNOME project do differently?
It is a very difficult question, and I don't have a specific
answer to it.
The project is very wide and heterogeneous.
The Desktop is in a stable, mature period nowadays, and not a
lot
of radical innovation is taking place there. Things like the shell or
zeitgeist are fresh air and hopefully will contribute to a solid and
exciting GNOME 3.0. But in the past years most of the innovation has
taken
place within the platform itself, with new components that are providing
the
applications with new exciting ways to interact and cooperate with the
world, and that are being used also outside the GNOME desktop, and
specifically in the mobile world.
> What do you see as the GNOME community's biggest challenge in the
next few
> years? (Or with GNOME 3.0.)
I really think that the biggest challenge is to compete against
and at the
same time cooperate with the revolution that is taking place in the web,
with very powerful new standards and technologies that are starting to
become the default choice for software development and deployment. HTML5
is at the center of all that.
There are many other things, obviously, like ensuring that we have the
right
accessibility support, keeping the good work in the most innovative core
technologies, consolidating things like the GNOME Shell, which as I said
can
provide the needed fresh air in the way we interact with the desktop.
> What excites you about GNOME?
The thing that excites me
most is that what I explained as the
biggest
challenge can also be seen as a very good opportunity: we can create
something very powerful taking the very solid GNOME platform as building
block, and WebKitGTK+ as the bridge between the two worlds.
