GNOME Foundation wants your money

Sam Varghese
Monday, 04 May 2009 04:53

Opinion and Analysis

Palmieri says in his appeal that "without a significant influx of steady contributions we will be unable to keep an Executive Director on the payroll without cutting into the activities budget."

His post has not received much coverage - I could find it linked to only on the Linux Weekly News (LWN) site. This tells us something about the GNOME media management people - if fund-raising was the priority that it appears to be, then the news should have been widely disseminated. But then, that is not surprising.

Comments in reaction to Palmieri's post have not been particularly encouraging. Only a single individual has mentioned that he has made a donation - and that was $US25. There are some supportive posts, but the question of Peters' salary figures repeatedly.

There are comments like "I personally would be ecstatic to make half that (in reference to Peters' pay). Why not knock off $20,000 to $30,000 from her pay?" and "It’s weird that (sic) Executive Director, whose task is fundraising, cannot raise funds for herself. Or is this blog post a part of her fundraising strategy? Quite unpopular and weird ask. I’m less willing to donate money to Gnome _after_ reading this, than before."

GNOME's championship of the controversial Mono project also figures, with one post saying: "I would be glad to donate to the Gnome foundation as soon as Mono is removed." Mono is a project conceived by Novell vice-president and GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza to develop an open source version of Microsoft's .NET development environment.

On LWN, the reaction from readers was not particularly encouraging either. One post said: "Perhaps this is a time, then, for GNOME to be employ a little bit of introspection and consider being more open to the wishes of all its potential users. I was a big fan once, but I got tired of the feeling that unless you wanted to have your desktop looking (and working) like a toy, you were simply not welcome. Perhaps at this time it would be good to practise a bit more humility and a little less haughtyness (sic)?"

Another post, just below the one cited above, said: "A big +1 on that sentiment. I have contributed money to open-source projects in the past, but never to GNOME because all of my inquiries, requests and suggestions have been met with hostility by GNOME developers. Sorry. GNOME has lost my "heart and mind" years ago."

Whether it is a coincidence or not, the GNOME project has suddenly revived its journal which had lain dormant since December 2007. The journal is described as "an online magazine devoted to everything surrounding the GNOME Desktop."

If a free or open source software  project seeks funds from the public, there is absolutely no problem with that. The other main Linux desktop environment project, KDE, has always sought public contributions. But KDE has never been perceived as anything but a community project.

If a project that is perceived as being somewhat closed to public suggestions - to illustrate this, I recall one discussion (read the whole thread) which Eugenia Loli-Queru of OSNews had with the GNOME folk some years ago when she made some constructive suggestions - seeks to raise money, one doubts whether it will be a success.