GUADEC/Gnome Fund Appeal 219
With the end of the year approaching, the Gnome Foundation has put together an appeal for help. You can also just head over to Gnome.org to contribute directly - and this year, they become a charity organization, meaning that contributions for US citizens will be tax deductions. Yay, tax deductions!
Re:Why is there a GNOME foundation? (Score:3, Informative)
According to this [fsf.org]:
The FSF promotes the development of free software -- particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants. The FSF helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of software freedom.
And when looking at the detail here here [gnome.org], it speaks nothing of FSF support. So I guess an uninformed guess would be "no, not for Gnome"
Charitable? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:this baffles me (Score:1, Informative)
1. Since when is KDE the DEFAULT Ui in RH8?
2. This is an appeal for a specific function ie: GUADEC, which I am not aware has any equivalent in KDE
Ximian conrtibutes inherently (Score:4, Informative)
And before some ignorant troll pipes up, no, Ximian does not exploit OSS coders by selling someone else's code, they charge for services and a few properitary, in-house-developed products like Connector [ximian.com]. If you want to use Ximian Gnome, and not get their services, you can download [ximian.com] it for free right from their site, as always.
Re:Sun (Score:2, Informative)
Re:A Charity Organization? (Score:5, Informative)
Where your money goes, and how GNOME PR works... (Score:4, Informative)
The money contributed to the GNOME Foundation for this appeal goes directly to helping us hold GUADEC, and importantly, to fly hackers over who otherwise couldn't go. I was a beneficiary of this support last year, and thus, able to attend GUAD3C in Sevilla (which rocked). I am hugely thankful to the Foundation, and its kind supporters (both corporate and individual) who contributed in this way.
I've been involved in conference organisation before (I was part of the organising team for linux.conf.au [linux.conf.au] in 2001), and I know how much time, effort and ultimately dollars it takes to stage a conference such as this.
Your last comment is an interesting one, because it shows a fundamental misunderstanding about what the GNOME Foundation is all about. It's about GNOME, the project, not about the businesses that contribute. This is one team, not a competition between individual contributors and companies.
We have one person involved in the Foundation who has 'proper' PR qualifications - she used to work for a very major PR company, who, funnily enough, happened to have MS as a customer, but I digress. She is a volunteer, like many of our hackers and contributors, but instead of writing code, she helps us with what a lot of the hackers see as 'dreary PR stuff'.
Have a read of foundation.gnome.org [gnome.org] - I hope it will clear up any misunderstandings you have about the organisation. I know there are a lot of them out there!