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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."
Since they drove away all of their old friends by ignoring any and all criticisms of their design changes.
Maybe GNOME will dry up and wither away, and most likely MATE will survive - because MATE is the GNOME people want.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
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!
You make a product that no one wants to use? You die as an organization. Fair enough.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
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.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.