The GNOME's Foundation's 2018 Annual Report has been published and paints a very positive picture. GNOME's financial position improved dramatically thanks to two large donations.

The GNOME Project was started in 1997 by Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero who were university students at the time and has become one of the largest open source projects. It is best known for its desktop, which is a key part of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian, SuSE and Fedora and also has a long history of producing critical pieces of software infrastructure. In addition GNOME has is a key player in the social evolution of the free software community and founded the Outreach Program for Women (OPW) to help make its community more gender diverse. 

The GNOME Foundation, a non-profit organization that furthers the goals of the GNOME Project, was formed in 2000 and membership is open to all GNOME contributors and the seven member of its Board of Directors are themselves all contributors to the project.

We reported on the first of the large donations - up to $1,000,000 in matched funding over two years from an anonymous donor - in July 2018, and the following month the GNOME Foundation announced that it had received $300,000 for the GNOME and $100,00 for GIMP from the newly launched handshake.org, a decentralized certificate authority and peer-to-peer DNS service.  As the annual report acknowledges, the new funds have enable the foundation to increase its budget for events and hackfests, double of the funding for the Outreachy program, and hiring several staff. In the bar chart below, the turquoise income segment represents donations and in expenses the green segment represents staff; the purple segment events and turquoise, Outreach. 

During 2018 GNOME had two new releases, 3.28 and 3.30 and the GNOME screen reading application, Orca, saw a significant amount of refinement resulting in better interaction with GNOME Shell, with improvements to performance ans minimizing searches for unrelated labels.

The project participated in Google Summer of Code with 15 successful students. Another two students successfully completed Outreachy internship by working in GNOME core applications, libraries, and new projects.

GNOME also made the move to GitLab in 2018. This the report states: 

was definitely one of of the most impactful transitions. With around 5344 opened issues, 9717 closed issues and 7085 merged requests merged Gitlab is now not only a code hub but also beneficial for the whole community as a project management tool used by engagement team, conference organization team, and Board of Directors and by other communities.

Neil McGovern, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation commented:

The switch to GitLab is of particular importance due to the overwhelming enhancement it adds to the development process of GNOME software. Most notably, it replaced Bugzilla as a far more usable issue tracking system, and provided GNOME teams with Continuous Integration (CI) for their projects.

More Information

News - GNOME Foundation 2018 Annual Report

GNOME Foundation 2018 Annual Report pdf

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