GUADEC/Gnome Fund Appeal

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

[Doctor Hu]

...and this year, they become a charity organization...

Well, tax-exempt non-profit under 501(c)(3), at any rate, which covers organisations other than those that are humanitarially charitable in intent. I'm not sure that I'd class Gnome Foundation [gnome.org] quite in that catagory.

Re:this baffles me

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't feed the trolls but

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

[cposs]

I think you have it a backwards there. Ximian, along with Red Hat and Sun, is one of the main developers of Gnome. Ximian contributes to Gnome by its very existence. Furthermore, the founder of the Gnome project, Miguel de Icaza, is one of the founders of Ximian [ximian.com].
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

[murrayc]

They do pay people to work on GNOME.

Re:A Charity Organization?

[zombiepopper]

Gnome isn't a "charity" but a tax-exempt, non-profit organization. This is right from gnome.org:

GNOME Foundation is a tax-exempt, non-profit 501(c)(3) organization and all donations are tax-deductible in the USA

There are plenty of other organizations that have the same status that are surely more disturbing than a group dedicated to working on such a high quality (free) project as Gnome.

Where your money goes, and how GNOME PR works...

[jdub!]

Here's a dose of reality. :-)

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! :-)