The GNOME Foundation Is Running Out of Money

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."

Comments

Funny

[EvolutionInAction]

Since they drove away all of their old friends by ignoring any and all criticisms of their design changes.

Re:Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking patriarchal slime. How dare you bring your sexist views into an otherwise rational debate? As women, we have a right to exist too!

Back to Reddit...

Re:Funny

[Intrepid imaginaut]

I fail to see how you fail to see what I was responding to, specifically "You're missing the real picture. GNOME is running out of money because they spent it on stupid outreach programs for women and "trans-women"". This does appear to be the case. The rest of the comment is indeed misogynistic and irritating.

Re:Funny

[houstonbofh]

Fucking patriarchal slime. How dare you bring your sexist views into an otherwise rational debate? As women, we have a right to exist too!

Only a woman would call the above rational... ;) (That was a joke!)

In all seriousness, however, you demonstrated the problem clearly. The Gnome Foundation has a core competency of creating user interfaces. (I know! Gnome 3 and competence is a stretch, but stick with me a second.) I don't care if you are a guy, a girl, or a dude in a dress... I want good code. But, women's advocacy has nothing to do with putting out a good UI. A ton of money was wasted that did nothing for them at all! This is not anti-woman. This is anti "women's advocacy."

Re:Funny

[houstonbofh]

How can this have been modded "informative"? It is a stupid sexist and homophobic attack.

Because accuracy also counts.

Re:Funny

[AmiMoJo]

It's not the comments that have decreased in quality, it's the moderation. Ever since the whole beta thing people seem be less willing to spend time moderating and meta-moderating the site. Hardly surprising; when you treat people that way it's not wonder they don't feel inclined to contribute their time and energy. Quite a few people seem to have left permanently since the boycott too.

Re:Funny

[Nephandus]

What you find irritating is irrelevant when accurate. The industry was male-dominated. This was declared sexist thus the current pissing away money and fucking over the males specifically and the industry generally to make way for females who couldn't hack it to begin with who think they're special. Of course, those females tend to piss off those already in the industry who could, but that's easily shouted down by the likes of you.

Re:Funny

[epyT-R]

The only thing they should be spending their funds on is the development of gnome software. That does not include funding political viruses like 'affirmative action'. Targeting money at programmers of specific sexes, races, or 'lifestyles', is discriminatory unless the case can be made why the targeted group writes superior code.

Seriously, your foundation needs to reevaluate its priorities.

Re:Funny

[epyT-R]

Yes there is. Reaching out to women because they're women is discrimination based on sex, which is inherently hypocritical when it's done under the feminist (stated) claim that sex doesn't matter. What you should discriminate on are programming and other relevant skillsets. Since race, sex, and sexual 'lifestyle' are poor indicators for those traits, you shouldn't spend significant sums pursuing people along those attributes. Those percentages are meaningless, arbitrary quotas.

These PC people are like viruses in that they require the resources of a host organization in order to propagate their ultimately self-interested message, which makes the host's goals of secondary importance to them, if at all. They invade organizations they see as having power in a particular community and sap resources that could be better spent on relevant goals, with particularly virulent ones killing their hosts off, entirely. I realize you mean well, but this is society-wide problem, and the only way to stop it is to resist their influence at the beginning. You might be threatened with 'discrimination' lawsuits and the like, but as long as the organization's policies are (and have a history of being) truly agnostic towards irrelevant attributes (and not just race, sex, and sexual 'lifestyle'), they're morally sound.

Equal outcome is not a good measure of equal opportunity. So, guidelines that discriminate on relevant attributes and pay no heed to balanced populations along irrelevant attributes are NOT oppressive, no matter what shaming language is hurled your way. If that results in a 50/50 split between the sexes, fine.. If not, that's fine too, because your organization is focused on hiring the best developers, not the best male or the best female developers.

Here's hoping.

[dosius]

Maybe GNOME will dry up and wither away, and most likely MATE will survive - because MATE is the GNOME people want.

systemd hard dependency

[nctritech]

Fuck 'em. They made the desktop environment require the monstrosity that is systemd, so I don't care if they go away entirely. GNOME was decent in the 2 series, though still never managed to not be buggy; when they moved to 3, everything went downhill HARD. Terrible UI changes that almost no one wanted, and then forcing systemd as a required dependency.

You did it to yourselves. Go become irrelevant. Viva la Fluxbox!

To be expected

[sandertje]

You make a product that no one wants to use? You die as an organization. Fair enough.

From the parent article:

[Anonymous Coward]

"The GNOME Foundation staff and board fell behind in their processes with being overwhelmed by administering OPW. GNOME's Outreach Program for Women is explained as "The Outreach Program for Women (OPW) helps women (cis and trans) and genderqueer get involved in free and open source software." They've had around 30 interns for their most recent cycle."

Let me translate. They were fucking off by diverging from the core project into recreational political activities unrelated to their mission.

I completely support the idea of such outreach, but if you don't have your core in order then they are best done elsewhere.

If you saw off the branch you were sitting on you have no place to seat the new folks you wanted to include.

There is no kind way to put it. GNOME fucked up due to willful stupidity. They'll see not a dime from me.

Re:From the parent article:

[vadim_t]

Let me translate. They were fucking off by diverging from the core project into recreational political activities unrelated to their mission.

But that seems to be what a lot of people on Slashdot want. Look at the Mozilla and DropBox controversies. Lots of people posting and moderating support those.

No, I'd say what people here want in general is for an organization to be apolitical. Being against LGBT is bad, but doing activities related to LGBT is also bad. A software company is supposed to be a bunch of people coding and nothing else, ideally.

Deviations are allowed only for subjects related to the core mission: patents, copyright, open source, etc.

Re:Does this mean no more Gnome desktop?

[OneAhead]

vast layers of layers of wrappers for layers of abstractions for wrappers for 3rd party libraries.

The correct term for that is "software" these days. Like it or not, that's how it is.

Re:Does this mean no more Gnome desktop?

[houstonbofh]

Pay some respect to those who went before and the work they did.

They are getting the same respect they gave the users who did not appreciate a multi headed very expensive single view tablet as a computing platform. If there was ever a call for Nelson Muntz, this is it.

Re:Does this mean no more Gnome desktop?

[Lisias]

Pay some respect to those who went before and the work they did.

I would gladly do that, if I managed to find them. Obviously, such people is not working for Gnome Foundation anymore.

Surprised?

[Lisias]

I'm not. Sadly, this is precisely what happens when non technicians do technical decisions on a tech Foundation.

Gnome Desktop 2 was one of the main reason I jumped ship from Windows and spend 2 excelent years developing on a Linux box. Almost everything just works, and the few that didn't, I managed to tweak it into production with little effort - I'm a tech guy, after all.

And then came Gnome Desktop 3. And I decided that the migration efforts would be better spent on MacOS X - that I'm using since that days. No regrets.

I think the time for a MATE Foundation has come. :-)

This is a screaming message to every Open Source Foundation around (yes, Mozilla, I'm talking to you): do what your users *NEED* you to do, not what your non techies "advisors" *want* you to do.

There's no space on a tech industry for "politically correct" tech solutions that doesn't cut it!

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...

Re:Does this mean no more Gnome desktop?

[Runaway1956]

Respect is, after all, a two-way street.

First, we heard that Ubuntu was going to push a Metro-like desktop. Then, almost immediately afterward, we heard that Gnome was going to push a Metro-like desktop. All across the *nix world, there were protests that rapidly grew into revolutions against the concept, but neither Ubuntu nor Gnome could be dissuaded.

I feel a bit bad that Gnome is in financial straits today. But, there is no real depth to my sympathy. I'm managing quite well on this Mate desktop. Had Mate not come along, I would probably be bouncing back and forth between XFCE and E17. Or, more likely, I would have finally settled on an E17 configuration that I liked. There are SO MANY variables and decisions to make when configuring E, whereas Mate and most other desktops just offer a well rounded "default" when they are installed.

Oh - you were talking about respect. Gnome should be an object lesson for other projects. Don't just abandon or try to bully your dedicated fan base. Don't insult their intelligence. Respect your users, or your users will abandon you in turn.

So greedy, they want money but don't want users.

[goruka]

Being honest, they only seem to be developing Gnome 3 for themselves and the few loyal users that remain with them. They are not interested in the rest of the community using Gnome anymore, they sent that message clearly several times, and we the past users understood. Yet, they ask for money with the excuse that some of the components are being used by other environments and/or applications.

I don't personally mind at this point if gnome dies, they should have seen what happened to KDE 4 and take note. They should have see what happened with Windows 8 and read the writing on the wall. Even Microsoft has changed course by now while Gnome is still heading to irrelevance.

If I were in their shoes, I'd simply change course, post a public apology, announce Gnome 4 and bring back everything that users are missing. That should give them enough support to stay alive. I'm sure there is still time for them. But as I said before, I don't think they even care so let them die.

Here's some real facts for you.

[Danious]

Sigh. Standard ignorant Slashdot commenting, perhaps you should read up about OPW before making stuff up.

Here's how it works. An organisation such as KDE decides to participate in OPW and so finds some sponsors to pay the US$5,500 stipend for each intern. In KDE's case we found one of our corporate sponsors who was willing to pay. The participating organisation collects the sponsorship money and pays this to the Gnome Foundation who then pays the interns. The Gnome Foundation also charges the participating organisation an admin fee to cover their expenses in running the program. There are at least 18 organisations who have participated in OPW in this way, including Mozilla, VideoLAN, Fedora, and the Linux Foundation. In the last round there were 30 interns from 8 organisations, only 3 interns were from Gnome.

There's two problems with this:

1) All the money passes through the Gnome Foundation accounts, making it appear they have spent 25% of their income on OPW, when in fact it isn't really an income or an expense to the Gnome Foundation, e.g. last round they paid out US$165,000 of which only US$16,500 was their own money, the rest was paid on behalf of the other orgs.

2) The program got so successful so fast that the Gnome Foundation's internal financial processes couldn't cope, they had to pay the interns before they had received all the sponsorship money from the participating organisations, and they used their own cash reserves to cover the gap. Once the participating orgs pay up, the Gnome Foundation will be back to normal again.

Anyone who's ever run a small business will recognise this as a classic cash-flow crisis from growing too big too fast before your admin has a chance to catch up. The lesson here is that the Gnome Foundation needs to set up a separate set of books for OPW and work harder to get the other orgs to pay the sponsors money up front.

So those of you slandering Karen Sandler claiming she's "stolen" money from Gnome for her own personal agenda really have some apologizing to do.

One other point to make is that the Gnome Foundation, just like the KDE eV, has absolutely no say over the direction of development of Gnome, they are just there to provide financial support to the direction the developers choose to take.

John Layt, KDE eV member.