GNOME Foundation Cuts Budget, Seeks More Volunteers and Donations (gnome.org) 12
"The foundation behind the Gnome desktop environment is having to go through some serious belt-tightening..." writes Linux Magazine.
From an October 7th announcement by The Gnome Foundation: Our plan for the previous financial year was to operate a break-even budget. We raised less than expected last year, due to a very challenging fundraising environment for nonprofits, on top of internal changes such as the departure of our previous Executive Director, Holly Million. The Foundation has a reserves policy which requires us to keep a certain amount of money in the bank account, to preserve core operations in the event of interruptions to our income. In order to meet our reserves policy, this year's budget had to reduce our expenditure to below expected income, and generate a small surplus to reinstate the Foundation's financial reserves to the necessary level...
We're asking for your support in several ways:
- Look out for opportunities to volunteer your time and skills in areas where we've had to reduce staff involvement.
- Share ideas on how to organize and improve our activities in this new context.
- Consider making donations to support the GNOME Foundation's core priorities, if you're able...
Through these difficult decisions, the GNOME Foundation is able to meet its reserves policy, ensuring sufficient funds for the coming year. Our budget for the new financial year is realistic and supports four full time staff, who are able to support key operations like finance, infrastructure and events. We are additionally contracting a number of other individuals on a short term or part time basis, to help with fund raising, websites and delivering on our project commitments.
We are going to be looking to the GNOME community to help with the areas that are most affected by our reduced staffing. If you would like to help GNOME with its events, marketing, or fundraising, we would love to hear from you.
In their new budget, "expenses have been greatly reduced," according to an October 10 update: We are also very relieved to be able to provide a surplus budget for the first time in many years, and doing so while still being able to support the community: events, infrastructure, internships, travel funding, and meeting our commitment to donors for work done in some parts of the stack, e.g.: Flathub, parental controls and GNOME Software.
From an October 7th announcement by The Gnome Foundation: Our plan for the previous financial year was to operate a break-even budget. We raised less than expected last year, due to a very challenging fundraising environment for nonprofits, on top of internal changes such as the departure of our previous Executive Director, Holly Million. The Foundation has a reserves policy which requires us to keep a certain amount of money in the bank account, to preserve core operations in the event of interruptions to our income. In order to meet our reserves policy, this year's budget had to reduce our expenditure to below expected income, and generate a small surplus to reinstate the Foundation's financial reserves to the necessary level...
We're asking for your support in several ways:
- Look out for opportunities to volunteer your time and skills in areas where we've had to reduce staff involvement.
- Share ideas on how to organize and improve our activities in this new context.
- Consider making donations to support the GNOME Foundation's core priorities, if you're able...
Through these difficult decisions, the GNOME Foundation is able to meet its reserves policy, ensuring sufficient funds for the coming year. Our budget for the new financial year is realistic and supports four full time staff, who are able to support key operations like finance, infrastructure and events. We are additionally contracting a number of other individuals on a short term or part time basis, to help with fund raising, websites and delivering on our project commitments.
We are going to be looking to the GNOME community to help with the areas that are most affected by our reduced staffing. If you would like to help GNOME with its events, marketing, or fundraising, we would love to hear from you.
In their new budget, "expenses have been greatly reduced," according to an October 10 update: We are also very relieved to be able to provide a surplus budget for the first time in many years, and doing so while still being able to support the community: events, infrastructure, internships, travel funding, and meeting our commitment to donors for work done in some parts of the stack, e.g.: Flathub, parental controls and GNOME Software.
Maybe they should volunteer (Score:2)
Make a desktop people can understand? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe they would do better if they made a desktop that people could understand and was easily configurable?
They could look at Mate for some inspiration there.
(Which sounds facetious but is actually a true statement.)
Re: (Score:3)
The main reasons I quit using GNOME was because:
1) The compositor would refuse to start occasionally despite running a completely stock configuration. Requiring a complete purge of the user's home directory to get it working again.
2) No support what so ever from the developers if you weren't running their latest git revision. "Oh, Evolution (An email client) stopped wor
Re: (Score:2)
That all sounds very Fedora-like. That is it's developed for the developers, not for end users. The oddest thing is that Red Hat is a billion dollar company but is letting Gnome struggle, and if Fedora is not Red Hat & Gnome in development then what is it?
Re: (Score:2)
Client side decorations and the hamburger.
A complete abomination that has spread to Chrome/Edge - try moving a window when you can't find a spare pixel because the title bar is covered in tabs.
At least Firefox gives you the option to turn that nonsense off and put up a proper menubar.
Re: (Score:3)
Maybe they start small by not being deliberately contrary to what everyone else around Wayland wants to do.
The recent changes to Wayland's protocol handling and governance rules were largely because of Gnome.
buh bye Gnome (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
IBM buys REDHAT ? (Score:2)
Did Red Hat support GNOME prior to IBM buying Red Hat ? If so, I believe IBM said "stop supporting an org. that is not needed for core functionality". So Red Hat money dried up and here we are. IBM these days only wants free labor, just look at how their employees are treated plus the CentOS change.
With that said, no one really likes GNOME3, I can deal with it and GNOME's colors and rendering are 100x better then KDE. But usability and config are 1000x worse than KDE.
FWIW, KDE defaults make my eyes stin
Re: (Score:2)
Ahh yes the old fallacy that if you don't like it, and the people you associate with don't like it, then everyone must also not like it. It's entirely possible that the majority of Linux uses don't like Gnome. But there a a significant number of users who use and quite like Gnome. For them the Gnome paradigm is quite intuitive, fast, and gets out of their way. For everyone else, Mate is still a thing and KDE 6 is great. Wayland works fine with many desktop environments (Xwayla