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Conservancy Blog
Displaying posts tagged Selenium
Conservancy News Round-up
by on May 28, 2019
May is for code releases! Check out these videos, blog posts from member projects, code releases and upcoming events.
Recent Videos and Podcasts
Deb's talk on Free Software/Utopia is up, on the Free software Foundation's MediaGoblin server.
Deb was also the guest of honor on Libre Lounge, Episode 19: Community Development with Deb Nicholson. Thanks to Chris and Serge for their dedication to free software and to Conservancy's work!
On Free as in Freedom, Karen and Bradley discuss two additional permissions that can be used to “backport” the GPLv3 Termination provisions to GPLv2 — the Kernel Enforcement Statement Additional Permission, and the Red Hat Cooperation Commitment.
Our Member Projects Have Been Busy
This summer's Outreachy interns were announced. "Congratulations to the 43 interns accepted to the Outreachy May 2019 to August 2019 round!"
phpMyAdmin -- along with several other Conservancy projects -- are excited about participating in Outreachy this round.
MicroBlocks presented at ROBOLOT, an educational robotics conference held in Catalan. The video of their panel is about 75% Catalan and 25% English, so feel to skip around or brush up on your Catalan.
The Godot team attended GDC, aka the "Game Developers Conference" in San Francisco reported on their improved name recognition at this year's event.
The folks at Reproducible Builds, shared" that security and software supply chain attacks were in the news and that this was a busy month for their distro work.
Some recent code releases:
- Kallithea 0.4.1 released
- Mercurial 5.0 released
- QEMU 4.0 adds micro:bit emulation support
- Samba 4.10.4 available for download
- SWIG-4.0.0 released
- Wine 4.0.1 released
Etherpad merged in a big chunk of code to improve recovery from brief server outages. "The resulting code is 15% smaller than before, and is also much easier to comprehend."
What's coming up?
Catch up with staff:
Karen keynotes sambaXP on June 5th at 10:15 local time in Göttingen, Germany.
Bradley will be at the Ninth Annual RacketCon in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he will give a talk titled, "Conservancy and Racket: What We Can Do Together!"
Many of our projects have events coming up:
In addition to the aforementioned sambaXP and RacketCon...
First talks are announced for Selenium's upcoming London conference, tickets are available now.
North Bay Python has announced their dates for this year's event, November 2 & 3, 2019. Talk submissions will open soon!
Conservancy News Round-up
by on April 17, 2019
Check out these videos, blog posts from member projects, code releases and upcoming events.
Recent Videos
- Bradley and Karen during their keynote at FOSDEM, "Can Anyone Live in Full Software Freedom Today? Confessions of Activists Who Try But Fail to Avoid Proprietary Software"
- Microblocks in use (it's in Catalan, but the smiling faces are understandable in any language!)
- Deb keynoted Gitmerge, "The Future of Free Software"
- Godot engine in use! These are from published games and games in development. Check out the Desktop / Console showreel and the Mobile Showreel.
- Bradley gave a talk at SCaLE, "If Open Source Isn't Sustainable, Maybe Software Freedom Is?" that got written up on LWN.
- The State of Godot address by Juan Linietsy
Our Member Projects Have Been Busy
- Outreachy getting ready for another round of interns! You can see the projects that are participating in this summer's program here.
- Lots of Reproducible Builds work in March
- Godot is receiving a MOSS Grant
- Inkscape's SCALE17x Hackfest 2019 launched plans for 1.0 release and more
- Recent Clojurists Together work funded through Conservancy
Some recent code releases:
What's coming up?
Catch up with staff:
- Deb speaks about governance at Open Source 101 on Thursday
- Swing by Bellingham to say hi to Bradley at our Linuxfest Northwest booth later this month
- Deb speaks about diversity at Red Hat Summit in May
Many of our projects have events coming up:
- Selenium Conf in Tokyo
- Ninth Annual RacketCon, plus Bradley will be there.
- Samba XP -- Karen is keynoting!
- One week blocks workshop for public school teachers, "Physical Computing with the BBC micro:bit"
- Teaching Open Source planning a summer POSSE meeting
Bonus news! GPLv3 code made the famous black hole picture possible. Congrats to Doctor Katie Bouman and her team!
Free Software: Behind the Scenes
by on January 15, 2019
We wrote a few weeks ago about how Conservancy has several projects that support new people or less technical people and help bring new people into free software. We also support many projects that most folks probably don't think about very often. Many of our projects exist relatively outside of the spotlight and facilitate the creation of free software by providing tools, systems and infrastructure for developers.
Testing and Automation
Once you've got some code, how do you make sure it works everywhere you want it to -- in the way that you want it to? Testing and automation. Selenium is a suite of tools for browser automation. The W3C recommended their WebDriver tool as the best tool for the development of a more accessible and collaborative web last year. Just a few short months ago, we welcomed Reproducible Builds, a project that attests that your build is safe and uncompromised. The integrity of code is critical if you care about user safety and true software freedom and that's why each build needs to be tested and verified using a free software tool.
Interoperability and efficiency are also important. Projects that ignore this can find it hard to increase adoption. QEMU is a generic and free/open source machine emulator and virtualizer that helps developers build programs that work on different kinds of hardware. This lets developers create free software that works on all kinds of machines and with all kinds of hardware. Buildbot is a framework which enables software developers to automate software builds by scheduling different pieces of work. Both tools help developers create software that is useful to all kinds of users on all different systems.
Freedom All the Way Down the Stack
It's a little easier to expain why you want software for the tools that users directly interact with, but what about the tools that most users never see? The bits that talk to the hardware, the pieces that turn on your machine and the code that powers the internet also need to be free. You can't mix and match fee and non-free code and be sure you are getting all of the benefits of user freedom. That's why we are proud to spport so many projects that live close to the bare metal and work on critical interstitial bits that don't always get a lot of press.
Samba removes barriers to interoperability and is standard on nearly all distributions of Linux. Samba is what allows GNU/Linux and Unix machines to access file and print servers that are designed with Windows users in mind. This kind of hardware to hardware level interoperability makes it easy for folks to choose a free operating system for their personal machine, when their workplace or school isn't ready to switch.
Harvey OS provides a fully free operating system with a very compact kernel in which all resources are treated as files. This provides Unix users new ways of working with permissions and applications. Coreboot is an extended firmware platform, which provides users with a lightning fast and fully free boot system for desktops, laptops, servers and tablets. Start with freedom as soon as you boot!
We must have a free software foundation to build on top of, if we ever hope to offer users a completely free computing environment, both online and off. Linux XIA is a protocol stack for Linux that uses eXpress Internet Architecture (XIA) to enable a more trustworthy and interoperable internet while also improving continuity for network users.
Metalink is dedicated to improving downloads. Metalink makes it much easier for people — especially those in areas with inferior Internet connections — to download Open Source and Free Software. Just one non-free piece in the puzzle can counteract the intention to provide user freedom, privacy and security by that free software developers are working to provide throughout the rest of the stack.
Nuts and Bolts
We love supporting tools that free software developers use as part of their workflow to create more free software. We host three version control systems at Conservancy; Git, Mercurial and Darcs, which is a distributed revision control system written in Haskell.
We also support projects that help developers maintain their internal code. Kallithea is a free software source code management system that we use for many of our own scripts and systems. It lets teams easily maintain different versions of internal code projects. phpMyAdmin is a free and open source web interface for the MySQL and MariaDB database systems. It's a mature project that helps folks administrate their web-based MySQL instances.
Conservancy believes that everyone deserves full software freedom, without backdoors or exceptions. Developers deserve free tools and users deserve freedom all the way down to the bare metal. We don't live in that world just yet, but it's got to be built one piece at a time. Many of our projects aren't famous, but they're all important for securing full user freedom and that's why we support their work here at Conservancy.
Conferences, Standards, and Sponsorships: Selenium’s Work in 2016
by on January 12, 2017
This series covers new developments and exciting projects taken on by Conservancy member projects. To learn more about Conservancy member projects, or the non-profit infrastructure support and services offered by the Conservancy, check out Conservancy’s Projects page. Please support Conservancy so we can continue to help all this important software.
SeleniumConf UK wrapped up November 16th! For three days, Selenium developers and enthusiasts got together to share ideas, work together, and spend time with other community members in London. This year, there were three amazing keynotes, a diverse group of twenty-six speakers, and four full day workshops. Talks are already posted online, and you can watch them on the SeleniumConf UK YouTube channel.
Selenium is a freely-licensed browser automation tool. While it’s most frequently used for testing purposes, it has capabilities beyond that. These include scaling and distributing scripts across environments and reproducing bugs. It’s currently functional in eleven languages, including C#, JavaScript, Python, and Ruby. All the major browsers ship with support for Selenium out of the box now, too.
Selenium has been a Conservancy project since 2010. Starting in 2011, Conservancy began to support Selenium’s efforts to host their own conferences, which have grown over the years to the successful events we know today. As a tool, Selenium has become an industry standard, with users ranging from individuals plugging away at their own projects to some of the largest companies in tech.
Selenium demonstrates a strong commitment to fiscal responsibility, and the project leadership looks to sustain Selenium beyond individual donations. In order to help power the project, the team promotes and manages large corporate sponsorships.
Earlier this year, Selenium 3.0 was released, replacing the original Selenium Core—Jason Huggins started developing the Core in 2004—with one based on Selenium WebDriver. Much like Selenium itself, WebDriver is becoming a standard in its own right. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a draft specification for browser automation based on Selenium WebDriver, and members of the Selenium project are on the team to make this an official recommendation.
Interested in getting involved with Selenium? There are lots of ways to contribute to the project—check out the documentation for details! You can also help them along by donating to Selenium.
