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The GNOME Foundation Is Running Out of Money

Posted by samzenpus on from the coffers-are-bare dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The GNOME Foundation is running out of money. The foundation no longer has any cash reserves so they have voted to freeze non-essential funding for running the foundation. They are also hunting down sponsors and unpaid invoices to regain some delayed revenue. Those wishing to support the GNOME Foundation can become a friend of GNOME."

4 of 693 comments (clear)

  1. Who would see that coming? by Rehdon · · Score: 5, Informative

    After I realized that no matter what the existing user base would say, the GNOME 3 developers weren't going to make Gnome Shell suitable for the good old desktop work flow (besides making it impossible to have GNOME 2 installed together with the new version ...), I started looking elsewhere. I tried several desktop environments, and then sticked to Cinnamon, a "no nonsense, it just works" shell based on the Gnome libraries.

    What I noticed almost immediately was that, in spite of the GNOME devs making fun of people jumping ship and waving them goodbye, Linux Mint received more donation money in a month than GNOME in 5-6.

    So there you go guys, people have voted with their feet deserting you, and with their wallets funding other, more worthwile open source projects: I'm tempted to help, just because Cinnamon is based on Gnome libraries, but the conclusion is that you reap what you have sown. No sympathy from this ex-GNOME user.

    Rehdon

  2. Re:Does this mean no more Gnome desktop? by ThePhilips · · Score: 5, Informative

    For many years, Gnome was the most popular desktop environment.

    That would have had a meaning, if GNOME was chosen based on technical merits.

    GNOME became "default" desktop only because at the time it was GNU project and unlike KDE/Qt had F/LOSS license.

    --
    All hope abandon ye who enter here.
  3. Re:Funny by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    No report for 2013 yet, but check out page 17 of the 2012 report. "Women's Outreach" accounted for 1/4 of all expenses. It increased 40% from 2011, apparently it increased again in 2013. So Karen Sandler takes over in 2011, Gnome blows all their money on her pet political project, then leaves a week before Gnome announces that they're out of money and have to freeze all non-essential expenses.

  4. Re:Funny by Sri+Ramkrishna · · Score: 5, Informative
    It had nothing to do with Karen honestly. While one could draw some line for when she left and when the crises occured, the truth of hte matter is that we didn't track our finances very well. So, after going through the books we realized that we had a shortfall due to the fact that we did not do collections from the OPW program. See, the OPW program became very popular very quickly, and organizations were not paying on a timely basis. Since interns had to be paid, the funds were coming out of the general funds.

    OPW should have their own general fund in which to tkae money out of instead of using GNOME's. That was where the mistake was. So, we're going back and getting the money owed so that we can fix up the general fund for GNOME. We should be back on even footing again by July.