In an update to the GNOME community, the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors has approved its budget for the upcoming financial year (October 2024 – September 2025). However, this budget includes some tough decisions aimed at maintaining the foundation’s long-term financial health.
The new one prioritizes the Foundation’s financial stability, resulting in a reduction of staff members. In light of this, Caroline Henriksen, the Creative Director, and Melissa Wu, the Director of Community Development, are no longer with the Foundation.
As a result, key responsibilities will be redistributed among the remaining staff and the Board. The Foundation also calls on community members to step up and help with event organization, marketing, fundraising, and graphic design. Additionally, budget constraints mean travel budgets will be cut unless additional funds are raised.
Despite these challenges, GNOME’s core events will continue as planned, thanks to event sponsors. The Linux App Summit, co-hosted with KDE, just took place in Monterrey, Mexico, and other signature events like GNOME.Asia and GUADEC are still on track.
Certain externally funded projects, such as Flathub infrastructure and Digital Wellbeing initiatives, are also unaffected. Thanks to existing grants from partners, these projects will continue without changes. Furthermore, GNOME’s operational infrastructure, including core finance and administrative functions, will remain fully staffed.
And now the main question – why did it come to this not-so-pleasant situation? According to the Foundation, last year’s financial plan aimed to break even; unfortunately, lower-than-expected fundraising coupled with internal transitions, like the departure of Executive Director Holly Million, created additional challenges.
Speaking of funding, let’s recall that last year, the GNOME Project (not to be confused with the GNOME Foundation, although the two are closely related) received an impressive €1 million work commission from the Sovereign Tech Fund.
So, what next? First, the GNOME Foundation is actively seeking a new Executive Director, a recruitment effort that will continue despite budget constraints. Community support is also more crucial than ever—members are encouraged to volunteer, share ideas, and donate if possible.
In conclusion, the GNOME Foundation is going to have a difficult year, but clearly, something needs to change, as some of its moves in the past year have puzzled the open-source community.
The most glaring example was the appointment of Holly Million (a professional shaman, artist, and herbal medicine maker) as Executive Director exactly one year ago, who left after only nine months.
Anyway. As always, we’ll monitor the situation closely and update you as it develops. For more information, refer to the GNOME Foundation’s official announcement.
Gnome has lots it's way and is slowly becoming macos-like with it's too simple dialog and settings and underperforming desktop manager. KDE is only ever improving and starting to take over in areas where customization and performance are needed more.
maybe gnome should talk to all the distros that rely on it and create some type of partnership or board with them. canonical, redhat and others could easily add a few resources or could even give advice on how they could deal with whatever issues they are having. Many distros use it maybe they need to let some of them take a lead on it.
if they ended the project it would probably immediately be forked and get the resources it needs from these distros that rely on it. heck its even needed for a lot software that is installed on linux. linux mint had to revert to older versions of software that are no longer supported with what they are using on mint os and mint will now have to maintain even more software on there own with more forks that will probably never get the same type of updates. gnome is not going anywhere it is still heavily relied on and would take a long time to replace.
linux mint will most likely have to continue forking more and more things as time moves forward. A Lot of linux software is built around gnome since its basically used everywhere accept some smaller projects.
As part of the Adwaita library catering just to GNOME's needs and apps relying on libAdwaita really being focused on GNOME, they are looking at forking more older GTK3 versions of different GNOME applications to maintain them as part of XApp. Among the new applications they are looking at forking are Celluloid, GNOME Calculator, Simple Scan, Baobab, System Monitor, GNOME Calendar, and File Roller. The Linux Mint April update goes on to note:
what i do not understand is why would mint fork these things and include them as the default which means using even more outdated programs when they could just switch to the flatpak versions and have the latest version in a default mint install. why does mint choose the harder path which means software falling behind others it makes no sense.
maybe the flatpak versions do not intergrate with notifications and other things not sure since i do use mint.
typo… it should say since i do not use mint
if they did not waste money on travel and motels and flights and events trying to show off they might have more money. majority of linux users are never going to travel to another country to see these people talk in person. They need to focus on the software and using only the internet to reach the community which is how most projects should function and its also easier for people to contribute to a project using only the internet since nothing needs to be done in person together when everything can be done together over the internet instead. heck projects do not even need a office building everything can easily be done from peoples homes.
Did hiring Holly have anything to do with DEI?
I guess it was pure stupidity…I they wanted a female, I'm sure there are some out there who know about software.
Gnome project is the prime example on how make bad decisions after bad decisions, and on top of that, have deaf ears to criticism.
They have shot themselves in the foot so many times already…. they maybe could get a logo refresh as well.
your english is terrible
yet they are still ahead of other projects and are used by many.
No surprise Gnome ignored their users and did what they wanted. Cinnamon and Mate took away a lot of developers, users and money.
cinnamon still has experimental wayland support which crashes the system last time i checked and i do not see any of developers from gnome project on these other projects. these other projects lag even more with using the latest more secure options in a timely manner.