Donations – GNOME Foundation

Donations within the EU are now handled through the Wau Holland Foundation

The GNOME Foundation and the Wau Holland Foundation (Wau Holland Stiftung; WHS) have recently reached an agreement that will significantly improve the way donations to GNOME within the European Union (EU) are received and managed.

Prior to signing this agreement, the GNOME Foundation was able to receive donations through many payment methods (including wires, checks, and Paypal transfers or subscriptions), whether for one-time donations or recurrent (monthly) subscriptions as part of the Friends of GNOME program. However, donors needed to be residents of the United States for their contributions to be eligible for tax-deductibility, and wire transfers were prohibitively expensive from Europe.

The GNOME Foundation worked closely with the WHS to streamline the process for donations made within the European Union. Thanks to this agreement, Europeans donating to the GNOME Foundation through the WHS in support of GNOME will be eligible for tax receipts, allowing them to deduct donated amounts in their annual tax reports to the extent permissible by the law in their local jurisdiction.

The WHS has become a valuable ally to the GNOME Project, providing financial support, knowledge and infrastructure for strengthening GNOME’s ties with their European donors.

“Having an entity for collecting tax-deductible donations within the European Union is something the GNOME Foundation’s Board of Directors has been working on for a long time. I’m glad the current Board was able to sign the agreement that turned this dream into reality,” says Andrea Veri, Secretary of the GNOME Foundation’s Board of Directors.

The GNOME Foundation thanks the WHS for its continued support and help.

Useful links:

Ready to make a donation from within the EU? Look at the “Other ways to donate” page.
The GNOME Foundation Board of Directors values transparency, and thus made public the agreement between the GNOME Foundation and the WHS. Look here for a copy of the agreement.

Interview with Gavin Ferris, GNOME Privacy Campaign Donor

GNOME recently raised $20,000 to fund security and privacy enhancements to our software. We are extremely excited by this, and want to thank everyone who contributed.

One person who we are especially grateful to is Gavin Ferris, who was a particularly generous contributor to the fund raising campaign. We recently spoke to Gavin about his reasons for donating to GNOME.

How long have you been using GNOME, Gavin?

About 6 years ago, I began dual-booting my Windows laptops with Ubuntu, so I first started using GNOME 2 then. I stuck with Ubuntu until about nine months ago, when the whole shopping lens and “We have root” thing made me uneasy about the direction Canonical was heading. I tried a few other distros at that point, and selected Gentoo; now all my development boxes run it with GNU/Linux and Gnome 3.6.3, other than a few headless servers running a stock Debian install.

We’re really interested to hear about why you chose to donate to GNOME. Why donate now?

For community-based, open-source development to work smoothly, a number of key frameworks have to exist. The ‘desktop’ GUI (and supporting ecosystem) is, of course, [one] such key framework. It’s vital that a vendor- and distro-independent offering is available in this space which provides: a) a great (i.e., modern and feature-rich) experience to the user, and b) a supportive, structured development platform for the programmer; and I think GNOME fills both roles well…

I believe those of us who can afford to contribute financially—and who value using free and open-source software on a daily basis—should be willing to do so. Also, seen through the, ahem, prism of recent news, GNOME’s privacy campaign is timely and its philosophy refreshing. Hence my decision to donate.

Do you have a favorite thing about GNOME?

The shell extensions architecture is cool, and I think it has finessed many of the usability criticisms originally levelled at GNOME 3, without making the overall system too fragmented.

What would you like to see in GNOME in the future?

Two things spring to mind (bear in mind I’m on 3.6.3 – but having read the reviews I think these are still relevant for 3.8):

First, I think it’d be great to offer the user a clear choice about what data gets transmitted by installed software components, across the network and between each other, in a way that is easy to use and proactive. … such a feature would be an important differentiator unique selling proposition for GNOME. I’m hopeful the proposed privacy enhancements will provide at least some of this functionality.

Second, I think a major issue with GNOME is its lack of an integrated “software-centre” application properly linked into the Activities-view search… I guess this is really kind of a convoluted upvote for GNOME Software 🙂

Those are the main things I’d like to see in GNOME. But the main thing I’d like to see GNOME in are my phone and tablet! Hey, if Ubuntu can do it…

Thanks Gavin!

Once again we’d like to thank Gavin for his generous donation, as well as taking the time to speak to us.

GNOME Receives Hardware Donations to Assist with High-Definition Support

Photo by David King

The GNOME Foundation has received several generous donations of laptops, which will be made available to contributors to assist with ongoing work on high-definition display support.

High-definition displays offer a significant improvement over traditional hardware, and are set to become increasingly popular in the future. GNOME is working to ensure that our software works well with them, and takes advantage of the opportunities they offer.

One of the donated laptops was provided by Brion Vibber, a GNOME user and supporter. Five more machines came from Intel’s Open Source Technology Center (OTC).

“Intel is excited about the possibilities that the next generation of high resolution Ultrabooks® will provide to their users,” says Dirk Hohndel, Intel’s Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist. “Accelerating better support for these systems by donating a few systems to the Gnome Foundation is just one of many ways in which we support the open source community.”

These donations provide a major boost to GNOME’s ongoing high-definition work. This is taking place over several areas of the Free Software stack, with GNOME contributors investing in and collaborating with other Free Software projects. Improvements have already been committed to Wayland as a result of this donated hardware.

The GNOME Project would like to thank Brion and Intel for their generous donations and ongoing support.