Author: Thom Holwerda
Source
As you may be aware, the GNOME Foundation has operated at a deficit (nonprofit speak for a loss – ie spending more than we’ve been raising each year) for over three years, essentially running the Foundation on reserves from some substantial donations received 4-5 years ago. The Foundation has a reserves policy which specifies a minimum amount of money we have to keep in our accounts. This is so that if there is a significant interruption to our usual income, we can preserve our core operations while we work on new funding sources. We’ve now “hit the buffers” of this reserves policy, meaning the Board can’t approve any more deficit budgets – to keep spending at the same level we must increase our income. ↫ Robert McQueen Learning that the GNOME Foundation can barely scrape by financially makes me irrationally angry. As much as I’ve grown to dislike using GNOME and thus switched all my machines over to KDE, GNOME is still the most popular desktop environment and used extensively by pretty much all the big corporate Linux distributions. How is it possible that this hugely popular and important open source project has to beg individual users for donations like they’re running an independent tech website or something? Where’s all the financial support from Red Hat, IBM, Oracle, Canonical, and so on? If not even an insanely popular project like GNOME can be financially stable, what hope is there for the countless small, unknown open source projects that form the basis of our entire computing world?
