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Mystery Donor Pledges $1 Million To The GNOME Foundation (betanews.com)
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.
"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.
GNOME devs have their heads deeper up their own asses than pretty much any project in the history of software development.
I heard that the gnome UI has devolved into a single large button labelled "NO" but I can't say if that's true. You know, so as not to confuse the users. The last time I looked at gnome it was headed in that direction.
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.
Probably Putin, trying to destabilize the Free Software movement and keeping the desktop fragmentation Gnome created (or, at least, greatly escalated) going.)
If if was Red Hat the donated the money, I can understand why it was anonymous. After what they did to us with systemd, there would probably be riots in the gnome user community.
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
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.
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).
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.