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Mystery Donor Pledges $1 Million To The GNOME Foundation (betanews.com)

Posted by msmash on from the secret-santa dept.

Brian Fagioli, writing for BetaNews: This week, The GNOME Foundation made a shocking revelation: a mystery donor has pledged $1 million dollars. We don't know who is promising the money -- it could be a rich man or woman, but more likely -- and this is pure speculation -- it is probably a company that benefits from GNOME, such as Red Hat or Canonical.

"An anonymous donor has pledged to donate up to $1,000,000 over the next two years, some of which will be matching funds. The GNOME Foundation is grateful for this donation and plans on using these funds to increase staff to streamline operations and to grow its support of the GNOME Project and the surrounding ecosystem. While the GNOME Foundation has maintained its position as a proponent of the GNOME Project, growth has been limited. With these funds, the GNOME Foundation will be able to expand and lead in the free software space," says The GNOME Foundation.

9 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. Please don't encourage them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    GNOME devs have their heads deeper up their own asses than pretty much any project in the history of software development.

    1. Re:Please don't encourage them by brickhouse98 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Knew it wouldn't take long for some douche to come in and blast Gnome. Somehow they do what every other DE does (ie. design what they want) yet take the most flack for it, not least of all from some AC.

  2. Should pay for a resurrection of Gnome 1. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Before the HIG, spatial file manager, shell, disabling of double click to launch executables and other Gnome groans. Despite given head starts by Microsoft with Me, Vista, 8 and 10 Gnome is still a major reason we haven’t had a year of the Linux desktop in the 20 years Gnome has existed.

  3. Re:hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Gnome will not hire developers, just those idiot designer hipsters. They will not stop removing features until all the functionality is gone and screen has just plain white content.

  4. Given the way Gnome3 has developed from Gnome2 by HiThere · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I suspect the donation is by Microsoft or Apple, given the way Gnome3 has developed from Gnome2. There's also the increasing monolithic spread of systemd, and various other trends that I find "equally encouraging". Such as adaptations to facilitate running Linux as a subsystem under MSWindows.

    --

    I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  5. Re:Microsoft? by StormReaver · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Microsoft benefits from more changes in Gnome.

    Microsoft doesn't need to do a whole lot to sabotage GNOME or KDE, as both desktops are cutting off their own noses to spite their respective faces. GNOME has always been largely unusable and so ugly that even its mother could be forgiven for wanting to drop it into an exploding volcano.

    KDE's decline began with the stagnation of the IO Slave architecture, the rise of Windows Explorer's bastard child, Dolphin, and the neglect of one of the world's best file managers, Konqueror. Since most of KDE's main features have been either neglected or mostly gutted, it really no longer matters which foundation gets the donation. At this point, they have already failed as a usable desktop (GNOME), or are well on the way to failing (KDE).

  6. For sure someone who just upgraded to ubuntu 18.04 by mugurel · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I hope 1M is enough to fix that mess. Successfully switching between user sessions is a matter of luck; Useful panel functionality is only provided through sometimes abandoned third party extensions; For anything other than the five-or-so options in the system settings you need to resort to something like a "tweak-tool"; Then there is the wildly unnecessary "swipe up screen" that get's in your way. All in all a very bad experience. I'm switching back to 16.04 for now.

  7. Re:For sure someone who just upgraded to ubuntu 18 by apoc.famine · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I tried to disable the stupid swipe up to log in for a bit, then realized you could just start typing your password and it would log you in.

    It's stupid as fuck, and everyone who came up with the idea, approved it, and implemented it should be shot.

    --
    Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
  8. Dear Anonymous Donor by imperious_rex · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Here's some other deserving open-source projects where $2M would have a wider benefit to the Linux community than GNOME:
    (in no particular order)
    1. Linux Mint/Cinnamon
    2. MATE
    3. GIMP
    4. Inkscape
    5. Firefox
    6. Scribus
    7. XFCE
    You're welcome.