The Queen’s Rebuke

news of my death abandonment of the GNOME community have been greatly exagerated.

seriously: I’m still here at GUADEC (typing this from the common area); I’m still on the Board of the GNOME Foundation; and I’m still working on GNOME tech, like Clutter, GLib, and GTK+.

I am also working at Mozilla (and we’re hiring! :-)), but I also worked at OpenedHand and at Intel, and that never stopped me from actually doing stuff on the side; lots of people in this community do this — you don’t need to be full time employed with a company to contribute to GNOME, or to try and give the projects goals and direction.

on Sunday, I tweeted this:

[tweet https://twitter.com/ebassi/status/229551373044305920]

if it doesn’t show up, here’s what I wrote: we were always a bunch of friends working on stuff we loved in the face of unsurmountable odds. here’s to 15 more years.

it’s very true that we lack resources. we always did. it’s also true that we are competing in a space that does not leave us much room. we didn’t get 20% of the desktop market either, though. we’re doing what we do not because of the market share, or because of the mind share, or because we want to be paid. we write GNOME, we document GNOME, we design GNOME, we translate GNOME because we love GNOME. you would need to pay us not to work on GNOME.

everyone here at GUADEC is aware that hard times are upon us; we (presumably, though we don’t have any real metric to define that) have lost users. we definitely have lost sponsors. it’s not the first time, and I suspect it won’t be the last. what we haven’t lost are our passion for what we do; our mission, to provide a free environment for users to work with; and our willingness to drain all the swamps we have in the Free Software world.

if you want to work with us, join the GNOME Foundation — both as a member or on the advisory board if you are interested in sponsoring the project. help out in one of the many teams, not just with code, but with design, documentation, translation, marketing, web development, and mentoring.

we have so much work to do ahead of us to not only stay relevant, but to fullfill our mission, and blaze the trail to the future of Free and Open Source Software — we’ve got to get to it.