GNOME: Felipe Borges on Google Summer of Labour and Sebastian Wick on "Flatpak Happenings"

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 05, 2025,
updated Nov 06, 2025

• GNOME ☛ Felipe Borges: Our Goal with Surveillance Giant Google Summer of Code: Contributor Selection

  Last week, as I was writing my trip report about the Surveillance Giant Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit, I found myself going on a tangent about the program in our community, so I decided to split the content off into a couple of posts. In this post, I want to elaborate a bit on our goal with the program and how intern selection helps us with that.

  I have long been saying that GSoC is not a “pay-for-code” program for GNOME. It is an opportunity to bring new contributors to our community, improve our projects, and sustain our development model.

• Sebastian Wick: Flatpak Happenings

  Yesterday I released Flatpak 1.17.0. It is the first version of the unstable 1.17 series and the first release in 6 months. There are a few things which didn’t make it for this release, which is why I’m planning to do another unstable release rather soon, and then a stable release still this year.

  Back at LAS this year I talked about the Future of Flatpak and I started with the grim situation the project found itself in: Flatpak was stagnant, the maintainers left the project and PRs didn’t get reviewed.

  Some good news: things are a bit better now. I have taken over maintenance, Alex Larsson and Owen Taylor managed to set aside enough time to make this happen and Boudhayan Bhattcharya (bbhtt) and Adrian Vovk also got more involved. The backlog has been reduced considerably and new PRs get reviewed in a reasonable time frame.

Linuxiac:

• Flatpak Development Restarts with Fresh Energy and Clear Direction

  Red Hat’s Sebastian Wick has shared some interesting insights into Flatpak’s development following the 1.17 pre-release, an unstable version (the current stable is 1.16.1), marking the first update in six months and a strong return for this popular Linux sandboxing framework.

  In his latest blog post titled “Flatpak Happenings,” Wick acknowledged that Flatpak had reached a stagnant phase earlier in 2025, with development slowing and open contributions piling up.

  Fortunately, development has now restarted thanks to renewed efforts from long-time contributors along with new maintainers stepping up to review and merge code more actively. Now, the project has been reorganized, streamlined its review process, and reestablished an active development rhythm.