Voice of the Masses: Should Gnome Foundation just focus on Gnome?
Some bad news today for Gnome fans: the Foundation behind the desktop environment is running out of money. Many attribute this to the controversy surrounding the Gnome 3 redesign, but that was a while back. Another problem may be: the Foundation is spending too much money on peripheral projects. For instance, according to the 2012 Annual Report, over a quarter of the Foundation’s expenses went to the Women’s Outreach programme.
While we all support efforts to get more women involved in FOSS, this raises a big question: should the Gnome Foundation be spending such a substantial part of its money on these projects? Or should it avoid social and political issues, and focus entirely on the technology – that is, the Gnome desktop itself? Let us know your thoughts below, and we’ll read out the best comments in our upcoming podcast!
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About The Author
Mike Saunders
Mike stores his data by printing out hex dumps and laminating the sheets. He's the author of The Haynes Linux Manual and the creator of MikeOS, an operating system hand-built from assembly language.
I think this link https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/CurrentBudgetFAQ should be included.
Most of the money going to OPW is coming from other sources, i.e. GNOME is not spending all its money on “peripheral projects”. Its just that they have messed up making sure that this money comes in before it goes out.
Please keep LV high quality. We need more journalism like LWN not phoronix.
Where did we state that Gnome is spending “all” it’s money on peripheral projects? We didn’t say that. The question is whether Gnome should get involved with these other projects (and risk financial complications like now), or focus purely on the desktop environment.
Oh, dear, Mike – you were the one who thought it best to illustrate which “peripheral projects” you were referring to by selecting the OPW as your example. Unconscious sexism?
Did you check to see how the money was spent and for what reasons, over what time-frame and with what results? Or did you just rush to print?
I am a bit sad about this because this apparently rushed approach to things is showing up in the magazine – too many typos and missing words that make it look like quick, last minute cut and paste jobs.
My criticism is all minor and trivial, perhaps, and probably pedantic, too. BUT – take a deep breath, slow down and think again before you publish.
I want your magazine to succeed and I want the podcasts to continue. I wish you could edit them a bit, though. Some of the voices are too soft and at times are drowned by laughter.
There’s a lot of laughter and you obviously have a lot of fun, but it may be good to see what percentage of each podcast is taken up in just broadcasting laughs, guffaws and chortles.
Now, get on and make Issue 3 a beauty, and the next podcast free of the word “awesome”.
Cheers
Floyd
Rush to print? Sexism? Sorry? The Gnome Foundation has admitted that it’s in financial difficulty because the OPW growth…
“impacted not only our ability to manage the OPW administration, but also to keep up with the core financial tasks of the Foundation”
So it’s a completely legitimate question to ask the community: should the Gnome Foundation continue to spend time and resources on OPW (fair enough), or spin that off into a separate organisation and focus purely on the desktop (also fair enough)?
It’s just a question. Discussions are healthy. Don’t read into things that aren’t there 🙂
1. From the link to the 2012 Annual report, it is clear that a decent amount of cash has gone to Womens Outreach Programme, but overall, the GNOME Foundation has still been profitable, albeit only by about $9k. I’m guessing they are a non-profit organisation, so this seems acceptable. Looking at 2011, it’s very clear that they had overspent by a great deal of cash in numerous areas, so it’s reassuring that they are back “in profit” for the 2012. Since the 2013 is not yet available, but they state the budget for 2013 will be close to that of 2012, I think there is little to worry about, especially as they state they have $274k in their coffers. As long as the 2013 budget remains in profit – even if only a little – they they will survive.
Are they spending too much on peripheral projects? No, I don’t think so. They have set certain important goals, and I think both the involvement in the WOP and the quality of the GNOME software in recent releases has proven successful.
3. I use KDE, but there is an interdependency on certain GNOME technologies in many a distro, so I don’t want to see GNOME fail, but as far as the 2012 report goes, I think we’ll be fine.
4. The PODCAST. With respect to @Floyd, the Podcast has been a source of “laughs, guffaws and chortles” for years now (previously with LXF) and is the main reason I listen to it. It may not suit all listeners, but if you can’t have fun with Linux, you might as well be using Windows.
Of course it’s not just because of the women’s outreach program, while a good idea they have lost their core focus.
I imagine a fair few previous investors in them jumped ship due to Gnome Shell. Those kind of massive UI changes don’t go unnoticed by people who pay them because they use their products, only to be forced elsewhere.
They need to stop with side-projects and get back to basics.
Is it possible an important portion of the support comes *because* they do these other projects, relevant to DE development or not?
The Phoronix article has a really unfortunate slant, down to the choice of picture. I really love Linux Voice, please don’t go down the Phoronix route 🙂
As I understand it they have a temporary problem because the OPW has been much more successful than they anticipated. OPW is a really valuable programme, I heard Karen Sandler’s talk about it at FSCONS last year: it’s had concrete results, this is exactly what we need to get more women into FLOSS. (Did you know that the gender skew in FLOSS is even worse than in IT/proprietary software in general?)
The FSF recently recognised them with the Free Software Award:
https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-award-winners-announced
BTW, I just made a long overdue donation to the Gnome Foundation to help them get over this bump 🙂
Maybe if development slows down, they will stop screwing up downstream apps and and APIs!
Oh how lovely that could be :))
The Gnome foundation is really important given how easy it is to tip gnomes over. However other garden ornaments require equally good foundations and there should be plenty of ground for crossover without deleteriously affecting the stability of gnomes in the long term.
Best. Comment. Ever.
Wrong end, friend. The reason for Gnomes tipping over is not the Foundation but that they tend to be top heavy. It would make more sense not to have such ambitious fishing rods, and balancing the hat:beard ratio would help too.
I am an academic philosopher and the outreach programme seems to underestimate or misunderstand the feminist critique of society, including the open source community.
Let me first state that I would love more women in IT. But women not choosing IT in the same degree as men should not be explained by women choosing to participate elsewhere, but rather as a consequence of the social structure built around these activities.
Without changing the fundamental understanding and self-understanding of collaboration, topics and not least of all the participants(!) quota strategies have little effect than to further alienate people by perpetuating stereotypes with regards to the above on all sides of the community.
IFF this group’s mission is to include more women instead of transforming the social, epistemologic and insitutional _existing_ structures it is failed in its entirety, and may end up obscuring a legitimate call for social justice, undermining its own raison d’etre.
In short, the GNOME foundation sponsoring an outreach programme looks more like political correctness based on a good intention than the effecting of substantial change; which leaves the programme’s inclusion in a budget _about software development_ highly questionable.
I must add, that in the case the outreach programme is indeed substantially transformative, of which I have expressed my doubts, it must still be shown to have the same substantial transformation _for the GNOME foundation_ in order to justify it as anything else than PC, IMHO.
The foundation, run by developers whose goal is give the results of their efforts away for free, chose to give part of their own income to a charity. This comes naturally to such generous folk. Those of us unable to code, and yet use free software, do not have ANY right to determine what the foundation does with its money. Your money is a gift, not payment for a service.
Hot on the heels of Canonical announcing they are axing Ubuntu One, too…
I think we are getting overly side tracked by discussing the Outreach program. The Gnome foundation should have one main focus that of the Gnome project, it should spend all its energy on the goal of helping to make Gnome as good as it can be, that’s the point of the foundation. It’s very easy for an organisation to spend a huge amount of time and effort on a none core activity because it interesting/worthy etc. This distraction however tends to damage the core goals.
One poster suggested we have no right to determine how the foundation spends it money, and to a certain extent I can see his point, however as a donor you have a reasonable expectation that the Gnome Foundation spends it money and effort on Gnome. Otherwise the donor is being mislead.
The sensible thing for Gnome, or indeed any organisation, is to protect the core business (for Gnome this is its desktop development) from the risk that resources are diverted away without limit to non-core interests. Setting up a ‘ring-fenced’ company structure will protect the interests of funders, staff and other stakeholders.
As a GNOME 3 user (a rare beast I believe), I would like The GNOME Foundation to focus on GNOME. I love the design of GNOME but find it bloated and unreliable.
The other projects that The GNOME Foundation work on are great but for me, the clue should be in the name. The Awesome Projects Foundation would make more sense if they want to work on various great projects. As The GNOME Foundation however, they should focus on GNOME. It’s so close to being insanely great!
I absolutely agree with Fin. I am also a Gnome user (this feels like some sort of counselling group) and it so close to being truly great that this should be the core focus. By all means focus on other (very worthy) projects such as OPW when the core product is great and ticking over nicely – but that is not quite the case currently.
Yes, I think this will be the year of Linux on the desktop.
I don’t know where the Gnome Foundation’s money comes from in the first place. Is it individual donations, corporate sponsorship or most likely a combination of these? Do they just have a rich benefactor?
I guess that if Gnome 3 was really unpopular then less people will donate money, but then the story doesn’t say they’re not receiving as much money, just that they’ve spent too much, or is that the real story: donations to the Gnome Foundation are down.
I can well believe that the Woman’s Outreach Programme was too successful and was heavily oversubscribed and I think it’s a good thing that people like the Gnome Foundation do things like this. I know it’s the Unix ethos to do one thing and do it really well, but one of the reasons I use and promote Free Software is for the social, political and philosophical principles it represents. Indeed, Linux Voice itself has made a commitment to support the Free Software community – it’s one of the things we love about you.
Obviously, I don’t want the Gnome Foundation spending so much money on peripheral projects that they can’t do their reason for being – making a great desktop – so I think they do need to look at how they run their peripheral projects.
Sigg3.net in an earlier post hints that the Gnome Foundation’s peripheral projects treat the symptoms of problems and thus help perpetuate them – hence the oversubscribing for some of the projects. For significant long-term change perhaps they could focus on the causes of problems – low key and low profile perhaps, but this more back-room approach could have significant long-term benefits for the Gnome Foundation and the causes we all support.
Hi,
This thread seems so wrong for so many reasons.
Firstly, there was a financial problem in 2011 but this seems to been addressed in 2012. The problem appears to have been caused by weaknesses in The Gnome Foundation budgeting and financial systems; this appears to be recognised by the Foundation.
Secondly, it seems fairly clear that The Gnome Foundation is receiving significant funding from sponsors specifically for the Womens Outreach Project. The Gnome Foundation appear to state that there systems weren’t up to scratch in collecting sponsors promised donations and that they have adressed/are addressing this; this seems to suggest that this may have been the cause of the funding problems in 2011.
Thirdly, it appears that the Women’s Outreach Project is engaged in a number of activities that are directly related to the Gnome Desktop. How you could possibly then characterise that as pheripheral is beyond me. I would suggest that it is far more likely that the Gnome Project is leveraging a Womens Project to obtain funding so that they can develope The Gnome Desktop in the way the Foundation would like.
Fourthly, bearing in mind that the Gnome Desktop is not presently adopted as the main desktop environment of any major distribution it might be that promoting the involvement of women (and other groups that are not represented as much as they should be) may well be more crucial to the future of The Gnome Project than you appear to willing to acknowledge.
Fifthly, you need to consider that your thread is kneejerk, inaccurate and may well be influenced by the politics of hate even though I appreciate that you are not intentionally hateful people. The tread is loaded with the assumption that The Women’s Outreach project is pheriphereal and a waste of money and you have absolutely no evidence on which to base that assumption.
Finally, can I suggest that you take some time to consider ways in which you can increase the involvement of women in the Linux Voice podcast and magazine.
Kind regards,
Adrian
As long as an organisation is operating close to the competitive free market it can do as it pleases.
If Gnome is financially incompetent and keeps spending money it does not have it will and should go out of business and therefore release its resources to others – KDE perhaps ?
The beauty of the free market is that no one knows how it should be organised. No one knows how much money should be spent on female and genderqueer linux users. No one knows if Gnome is making an error spending money in this way. All we know is that we will arrive at a more optimal arrangement by allowing experiments to succeed or fail in the market.
For any individual to presume that they have the answer to how Gnome should be organised is the fatal conceit and the pretence of knowledge !
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fatal_Conceit
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1974/hayek-lecture.html
Mike, sorry to arrive so late at the party, but I just picked up the first issue at the local bookstore and came to check out the website while I consider subscribing. I`m a GNOME contributor and know the facts already, but like a couple of other posters, I think the level of commentary could have been elevated a little by a better choice of wording on your part.
These days even if you say anything – about spending on womens program with most polite words and want a genuine discussion on that – , then the geek-feminazist will start accusing you ” of sexism, article to be in bad taste,… and what not”
It is impossible to have a genuine discussion with a philosophy which is based on entitlement, hate and fake-cries.
Geek feminists start crying as if anybody is stopping them to open a repository in github or start contributing to an existing github repository.
Till now i have contributed to many many projects without ever exposing my own gender/race, without knowing the other developers actual name/gender/race. Signficant contributions without any monetary compensation.
But these feminists want to contribute to open source “only only if” they are financially compensated. If they think so, then nobody is stopping them just create one more desktop called feminist’s desktop.
GNOME desktop earlier was contributing neither to MRA and nor to feminists positions, neither it was stopping/encouraging men – nor stopping/encouraging women, it was just about contributions by humans to FOSS and GNOME foundation was focussing on software itself. But feminists deem – the earlier neutrality of GNOME foundation – as sexism. What a joke.
come on , love FOSS? then just contribute code, nobody asks your gender/realname in github
“talking just about neutrality and just focussing on software” – is fully criticizable. But one can not criticize the “geek feminism’s entitlement mentality”, that criticism will be a sin