The GNOME project is built by a vibrant community and supported by the GNOME Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity registered in California (USA). The GNOME community has spent more than 20 years creating a desktop environment designed for the user. We‘re asking you to step up for GNOME and become Friend of GNOME. We’re working to have 100 new Friends of GNOME join by January 6, 2020.
The GNOME Foundation was founded in 2000, to support the activities of the GNOME project and our goal of building a desktop environments that respects the freedom of every user, developer, and contributor. We continue to make great strides towards this.
2019 has been an exciting year for us with the expansion of the Foundation‘s staff and efforts:
- We had three wildly successful conferences, 13 hackfests, and newcomer events to help people make their first contributions to GNOME.
- We sponsored three amazing Outreachy interns and mentored eight additional students through Google Summer of Code.
- There were numerous technical successes, including updates to GTK, new releases of the desktop environment, and infrastructure improvements.
- We introduced an Inclusion and Diversity team in order to make the GNOME community a more welcoming place.
- We were excited to announce the Coding Education Challenge.
- The Travel Committee sponsored numerous speakers and contributors to support their work in GNOME, through providing travel funding for hackfests, conferences, and speaking opportunities.
- We had speakers and booths at conferences in Asia, Europe, North America, and South America.
This year has not been without challenges. Most notably, October brought with it allegations of patent infringement from Rothschild Patent Imaging, Ltd. Rather than settling or backing down, we are taking this fight as far as we have to in order to say that patent trolls have no place in free software. This effort is something we’ll be carrying forward into the coming year.
Looking ahead to 2020, we already have a lot going on in addition to our patent case. There’s kicking off the GNOME Coding Education Challenge in order to expand the tools we have available to learn and teach. We will be seriously expanding our accessibility efforts, and are currently planning an accessibility audit and making plans for updates to the Orca screen reader. We’ve already started planning GUADEC 2020, which will bring us to our first North American GUADEC in Zacatecas, Mexico. We have a GNOME.Asia in the works. There will be more hackfests and newcomer events, intern and mentorship opportunities, and constant efforts to work on, for, and with the community. We’ll do all of this while upholding the standards of technical excellence you have come to expect from the GNOME project, building software for people of every country with every level of ability.
The GNOME Foundation supports the work of the GNOME community, and we need your help to keep going. We’re working on the future, not just of how you interact with your computer, but the future of free software and we want you to join us. Step up for GNOME! You can become a Friend of GNOME, to support us on either an annual or monthly basis. We ask for a minimum donation of $10/month, and recommend $25 a month ($5 for students). Every donation comes with a Thank You postcard from a GNOME hacker and a discount on GNOME swag when you find our booth at a conference. For $30 a month, you can get a subscription to LWN. If you donate $500 or more on an annual basis, you’ll get a wonderful Thank You note especially from executive director Neil McGovern.
We’re bringing software freedom to the desktop. We‘re developing a safe, secure, accessible desktop environment for everyone; building a global community of contributors; and fostering the next generation of free and open source software contributors. By becoming a Friend of GNOME you are becoming a part of that.
Cheers,
Andrea, Bart, Emmanuele, Kristi, Molly, Neil, and Rosanna
