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?
Canonical stinks. GTK stinks. Unity/Gnome stinks. Snap stinks. Canonical’s goals touches and poisons so many projects.
I feel bad that the org has to scrape by but there’s a lot more they could do to compete against KDE.
Nonsense comment. GNOME is a Red Hat IBM project. Canonical just slaps on some extensions in Ubuntu to make it useable by default.
Their default theme looks like grey mush.
Why should I donate to them?
That’s nothing, the Cyber Resilience Act will put a end to OSS in Europe.
No it has been amended
https://linuxfoundation.eu/cyber-resilience-act
I see a list of many prominent, profit-earning corporations which are members of the GNOME foundation.
I see that the GNOME foundation got a €1M windfall from the Sovereign Tech Fund six months ago.
I also see where the GNOME foundation asks me, as a retail customer, to donate money.
What I do not see is how much these large corporations donate, what the expenses of the foundation are, how much retail customers like myself donate, and how much the shortfall is.
Therefore, I don’t know what to donate, or how it would help. I could be throwing money at a complete shit show of an organization. I don’t know.
I can go to the OpenBSD foundation and see a nice bar graph and I know how my donations help. I can go to SoylentNews and see a nice bar graph of how much more they need for operating costs.
What does the GNOME Foundation want? Do they even want anything, or is this financial ask just a statement of fact that will resolve itself when Red Hat makes its annual contribution? Are we donating to operating overhead, or did this money go towards recent changes that made the file selector useful for the first time in a quarter century? Doesn’t Red Hat pay its developers?
Why should I donate?
They mention that one million “windfall”.
Right, I saw that. But all it tells me is that the operating expenses of the GNOME foundation are more than 1 million in six months. I can extrapolate and assume north of two million for a year, but then what? How much do they need? How big is this three year deficit? How much are for-profit organizations donating versus end users? Does the Sovereign Tech fund automatically replenish?
How much does the foundation need?
I’m operating on a salary equivalent to a single Senior Red Hat software engineer; I can only do so much. Would IBM Red Hat or Canonical be able to make up the difference? It’s a rounding error to them. I find it appalling that something as large and prevalent as Gnome, the desktop used everywhere in the world, would be struggling when there are major players who benefit. I can’t say I’m surprised, but this isn’t some low level library or an obscure app with an equivalent BSD licensed alternative. It’s literally _the_ Linux desktop on cash registers and computers and servers everywhere.
What am I missing?
I think you make some good points there. All of which would be answered (I think) with open sharing of their accounts/books.
Certainly if they are going cap-in-hand out to individuals, I expect a certain degree of transparency. Which atm, I don’t see
Should clarify, I’ve read their reports. But they are threadbare. Having worked in the charitable sector in the UK, this falls well below the minimum the UK would require to claim gift-aid.
Ok, but that money still goes towards covering their software development costs, freeing up funds for others things. So, it begs the question: Where are all the other donations that don’t have strings attached going to?
As I’ve said below, non-profits have a habit of acquiring “soft costs” in the form of bureaucrats and consultants who are paid a lot of money while contributing bugger all, so I reserve the right to not be “irrationality angry” until I see where all the money is going.
Exactly, I reserve the right to not be “irrationality angry” until I see where all the money is going. Non-profits have a habit of acquiring “soft costs” in the form of bureaucrats and consultants who get paid a lot of money while contributing bugger all.
You would have to look at the accounts or published financial information to find out how much companies and other non-profits put into the foundation. There’s a reports page (https://foundation.gnome.org/reports/) that goes as far as 2022. It looks like the organisations on the advisory board put in over $100k for 2021/2022. That’s not really a lot given how much some of those orgs depend on GNOME but I’m sure it could be said that they have plenty of other commitments to other foundations, industry bodies, committees, etc. Those running the corporations probably also feel that they contribute by paying employees to work on GNOME, which is often a double-edged sword given that corporate contributions will be aligned with corporate aims, and those employees would have to be paid to do the work in any case.
But, yes, FOSS is underfunded by corporations because they operate using different financial rules to regular people. Getting sponsorship for an event is fairly easy. Getting a company to commit to funding a technology platform is probably not so easy, unless there’s some kind of contracting/consulting agreement in place.
Thanks for the link. I’m on a phone right now and will check later, but this helps tell the story a bit better.
They really need to state their yearly goal up front, and have a tracker updated regularly so we have some idea what the shortfalls are and who is contributing.
I feel this story needs a bit more investigation.
Redhat and other sponsors directly hire developers working on the project. Volunteers are (as the name suggests) are unpaid. And their build Infra is donated… So what exactly is the money going on?
This feels a case of feathering of nests by those at the top, expecting top tech bro renumeration when effectively working for a non-profit.
I have to agree: this is a tough one to take sides.
Loving gnome and providing some free software myself of course I fully agree that corporates benefit from the eco-system stepping in and funding those efforts. I also know that programming is one thing, while marketing, governing and organizing are different full time jobs.
Still I wonder a bit: what has the foundation done to secure the needed funding? And how has this money been spent? (The Mozilla Foundation made me ask those questions.) Being broke out of the sudden makes me a bit skeptical. It looks amateurish while my understanding of the foundation’s purpose was they should provide the professionalism to steer the volunteers through exactly this rough water.
How is it possible that……. ?
This has been the case since ever. I remember a pretty similar case twenty some years ago tirh the distribution then named Red Hat and a tool for admins called Red Carpet.
If I recall correctly, then, due to the lack of any support the developer stopped working on it.
Switch to Lomiri.
It’s finally in the repos of main distributions, functional, and with a bit of polishing, would be much better than GNOME has been in years.
On a related note: kde’s received donations are counted in hundreds of thousands versus thunderbird in the millions of dollars.
I used to donate to Gnome a few years ago. The Gnome 3 switch and the militant nonsensical design guidelines made me leave.
Example:
* Ticket: Why can’t we press delete to delete a file in file manager?
* Response: We require you to hold shift and press delete to keep people from accidentally erasing files. (closed)
* Reopens: can that be adjusted locally?
* Response: No (closed)
* Reopens: That’s kind of silly, couldn’t you just prompt with a “are you sure” dialog?
* Response: No. That goes against our design language. (closed)
After the above, I stopped donating. They’re free to be dumb and make Gnome art for the sake of art, and i’m free to not donate.
To be clear, several years later (last year I think), they reversed this design decision and now show a popup with an undo button.
It mostly highlights how toxic they were for a while. Instead of adding some new design language to show a popup, dialog, etc. They closed reasonable requests without any kind of debate just pointing at their rigid design language.
I’ve been a Gnome user since 1997, during the 1.x days when Gnome only supported bitmapped fonts. I develop applications using the Gtk toolkit, I’ve never sent them a penny before this, but I made a big donation to thank them for a lifetime of free software. I know there are many camps when it comes to desktop environments, but if you have the means, I would hope everyone would donate. More choices in free software is always a good thing.
Red hat is IBM, which is rapidly self destructing imho. Which is sad in its own right. Cannonical has never really been profitable as far as I know. That just leaves Oracle, which is hilarious to expect them to spend money they don’t need to. Its sad, but not sure what to really do about it.
If Gnome devs weren’t so user hostile towards mac and windows users trying to switch, maybe they’s have a dedicated user base that actually cared or would even pay for the operating system. Just my opinion.
Hi folks, Rob from GNOME here. Thanks for your interest in the GNOME Foundation and everyone’s engagement in the topic! I wanted to reassure people that at present there is no specific/acute financial hardship going on here; apologies if my blog post was confusing or ambiguous at all. In previous years we were spending surplus reserves, because it’s expected/intended that when people give us money, it’s so that we spend it on GNOME. This year we’re break-even but the expected income covers us doing all of our usual stuff – events, infrastructure, travel, fiscal hosting for Flathub, GNOME and administration of the €1M EUR STF project. On top of that, we’ve still got reserves to continue doing all of those things for 12 more months, which is what our reserves policy says. The reason we’re hoping to raise more funds is so we can get more done – so we’ll be sharing our new strategy and initiatives over the coming months, and explaining how people can support. Thanks!
Hahaha – how the hell is this even possible?