Are You A Friend of Gnome?

From the donation page: "Love GNOME? Want to give back to the community of mostly volunteer developers who have worked so hard to make GNOME the powerful, flexible, friendly, fun desktop that it is?" There are a number of contribution levels a person can join at, so if you love Gnome, consider helping the foundation out.

Comments

Re:I love gnome, KDE just not up to it

[Bitsy Boffin]

I've tried each WM, but I keep on coming back to GNOME.

nit.pick();

GNOME isn't a window manager. Neither is KDE for that matter (although KDE has it's own window manager I think (kwm ?) but GNOME does not).

Re:Gnome on Solaris...

[Anonymous Coward]

The main point about GNOME is that it is language neutral. You can use many different programming languages to directly take advantage of GNOME's libraries. Almost any language you can name interfaces easily with GNOME (GTK+, whatever).

KDE on the other hand is very much biased in favor of C++. If you don't use C++ on KDE, you are very much a second class citizen. There can be no direct access to the KDE libraries unless you use C++ style name mangling. And even once you pass that hurdle, it is non-portable. For non-C++ languages to work with KDE, kludging wrappers must be provided, and even then you don't really get to take advantage of the underlying code directly. Eiffel, for instance, can not directly inherit from a KDE class. No way.

KDE is not friendly to other programming languages. GNOME is friendly. That is the philosophical crux of the matter.

Donate

[quasi_steller]

Donating to Free Software may sound dumb, but it really is a good idea.

1. You can donate whatever you can afford ($5.00 is better than $0.00).
2. Free Software isn't cheap (In that development costs money in several ways: hardware, time, etc. and the software itself is usually very nice)
3. It is a great way to give back to the community if your coding/writing skills are not the best

Re:No, I'm a friend of KDE.

[inc_x]

Then you will be happy to know that KDE has a donations page as well! ;-)

Misreading?

[Chuck Chunder]

No, I simply realise that the address a cheque happens to be delivered to is not significant, who the cheque is made out to is.

They clearly say they will use the money to "provide development, education and promotion for GNOME worldwide". If you want to be a friend of GNOME and have something more specific you'd like your money to go towards then just tell them. As their charter states "The foundation will be in charge of disbursing these funds to the benefit of GNOME and, to the extent possible, in accordance with the wishes of the benefactor."

There is nothing hidden here. There is info on the foundation pages, the foundation mailing list is open for all to read. There might not be a vast amount of info on the friends page but that is because they aren't putting on a hard sell. It's there for you if you feel that you'd like to contribute, not trying to make you feel that you should.