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Michael Larabel writes at Phoronix that the GNOME Foundation is running into a budget shortfall and funds are becoming very tight. According to Larabel one of the reasons the Foundation got into this situation is through its Outreach Program for Women (OPW) which had around 30 interns for their most recent cycle and managing the program (and funds) for a number of other participating organizations. The GNOME Foundation staff and board fell behind in their processes with being overwhelmed by administering OPW. "Making matters worse, in their 2014 budget they made assumptions based upon the previous year's incomes and expenditures, which were more optimistic. There's also the matter of payments from GNOME sponsors and others owing the GNOME Foundation money being rather fluid or coming in late."
To rectify their budget shortfall, the Foundation is going through with its invoicing of conference sponsors, more pro-actively following up on unpaid invoices, better invoicing OPW sponsoring, increasing their general fundraising efforts, and taking other efforts. The Foundation also voted last week to "freeze Foundation spending which is not essential to the running of the Foundation. By keeping expenditures to a minimum while some delayed revenue is regained, the board aims to have things back to normal within a few months." Those wishing to support the GNOME Foundation can figure out various donation means by becoming a friend of GNOME.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15 2014, @03:15PM
Couldn't happen to a nicer group of people. Isn't this what happens when you shit on your users? Maybe they should stop being arrogant asshole to their users and they might get more support?
(Score: 2) by forsythe on Tuesday April 15 2014, @03:51PM
(To begin, from what I've heard there's actually no need to donate, it's just that the OPW sponsors need to fulfill their end of the bargain and pay up, because Gnome has been generously covering costs out of their own pocket while they wait for the money).
Frankly, I'm taking pleasure in this (well, less pleasure than when I thought it might actually have consequences for Gnome). Developers displease their user-base, get funding cuts. Democracy in action. Reaping what you sow. Eye for an eye. Justice. Sure, it's petty, but I guess that makes me a petty person.
At this point I'd like to say something noble-minded about how by donating just ten dollars each, we can do our part to make sure software we see as quality doesn't suffer. Earlier this year, for example, there was news that OpenBSD was running into funding problems [marc.info]. (I've heard that was mostly resolved for this year [arstechnica.com], by the way.) But these stories only seem to show up when the debts are at or beyond the level of flash crowd-funding or corporate sponsorship. So if I decide to reward X and spite Y, I might see Y change their policies... or simply spend their resources designing a beautiful donation page and spreading the link around through social media, reaching the millions of other users who don't feel, like I do, that introducing a technical reliance on libZ and deprecating support for W are grievous offenses.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday April 15 2014, @06:51PM
I'll get hate for saying it but fuck it, I hope they go broke as I HATE political correctness and OPW is practically textbook political correct bullshit! Its the classic "We have to have X number of (insert what they consider a protected class, be it women, blacks, transgendered, whatever)" so they "create opportunities" (read discriminate against anybody that isn't in X) until they get their number of X.
Now call me crazy but I always thought you should merely insure that EVERYBODY was welcome and then if transgendered wanted to work on FOSS? Then they could, same with women or blacks or hindi or those that believe in FSM or whatever. What something like OPW does is tell me that transgendered are NOT as good as anybody else, because they have to be given special breaks just to compete, they and the women hired by OPW are tokens and simply aren't as good as those not hired by OPW. That is what happens when you create quotas and victim classes, you create discrimination and looking down upon the victim classes. if that is your goal GNOME? Congrats, mission accomplished.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday April 15 2014, @09:39PM
In general, I agree. To me, ideally, everything should be treated like a meritocracy -- all aspects of a person that are irrelevant to their performance relative to other candidates should be ignored. Ethnicity, gender, culture, political affiliation, etc. is all arbitrary and should not matter for most things.
People don't generally think that way, though, so it's good to be introspective and question if you're letting biases interfere with your organisation's purpose, especially if there is a large disparity. That doesn't mean creating quotas, though, it means verifying that you're really giving everyone an equal chance to play and then choosing the best fit.
Ironically, bias interference is what seems to be happening with GNOME. In their charter [gnome.org] they claim to be a meritocracy, but their financial problem right now is caused by trying to be the exact opposite. It's awesome that they want everyone to have a chance, but these outreach programs are targeting specific groups, which isn't a meritocracy. It's creating a special sub-class and saying, at the same time, both "you need hand-outs because you can't cut it otherwise" and "you're more special than these other sub-groups that don't deserve help". The whole thing is insulting.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday April 15 2014, @04:09PM
What happens when it finally flounders and you get a flood of infected people spreading the disease to other projects?
The symptoms look like:
Corporateocracy
Monolithic systems instead of small tools
Never use a standard when you can create a new one
authoritarian decision making
NIH
coveting a walled garden
Lots of politics with who's in as an app in the environment and out as a mere unsupported 3rd party
us vs them thinking with no one thinking of the users at all
style over substance and functionality
complexity always enshrined over simplicity
massive dramatic systemic forklift upgrades are the only way
Lots of academic ivory tower theorizing over who and what users are rather than at least making dogfood they can eat themselves at the very least.
Doing anything equals doing the right thing.
The two big DEs have converted over time from WIMP window managers, to bloated Biosphere-II-scale ecologies, to something akin to neo-feudalism where all the peasants clicks belong to the nobleman who makes all the decisions from his ivory tower.
If the two big DEs fall, which seems inevitable and is frankly a net gain to the OSS community, and this zombie horde descends on the civilized WMs of the world, is my WM doomed to be ruined?
Or rephrased, if everything I don't want in a desktop is in two isolated festering pools of infection, I should do what I can to isolate the infected from the rest of the community, and should at least hope the big DEs don't fall.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15 2014, @06:30PM
If the two big DEs fall
MATE - Fork of GNOME 2
Trinity - Fork of KDE 3
Xfce - Predated the Big 2 and is doing just fine
LXDE - Came from nothing to being a viable DE is a relatively short time
Enlightenment - Spent some time in Limbo but is making impressive strides now
Unity - Hey, some people like Brussels Sprouts too
I can't remember the name, but there was another fresh DE project I saw announced recently.
The KDE 4.0/4.1 fiasco and GNOME 3.0 slap in the face were seriously retrograde for many folks, but there are still LOTS of choices available.
{Cue for someone using only a window manager to chime in.}
-- gewg_
(Score: 1) by emg on Tuesday April 15 2014, @06:57PM
"{Cue for someone using only a window manager to chime in.}"
My HTPC doesn't even run a window manager, it just boots into Xbmc.
If anything, the Gnome 3/Unity debacle has encouraged a much greater variety of Linux UIs as people have been forced to look elsewhere for a usable desktop.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 17 2014, @07:44AM
doesn't even run a window manager
8-) You're making me think of Topper. [dilbert.com]
the Gnome 3/Unity debacle has encouraged a much greater variety
...and it's obvious now that I forgot to include Cinnamon.
Amen.
Still can't remember the name of that new project I read about.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday April 15 2014, @07:29PM
Is Trinity viable? The rest seem like good choices, though several appear to depend on Gtk, it's probably Gtk2.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by boristhespider on Tuesday April 15 2014, @07:36PM
Doesn't matter. If KDE fall then, well, we can simply fork KDE4 and keep using it, perhaps renamed Quad, or Quaternion or something like that.
(Score: 1) by LukeSkywalker on Friday April 18 2014, @05:53AM
Here is a posting over at IgnorantGuru's Blog (the author or SpaceFM file manager), and his issues dealing with themes in Gnome3, and posts from the dev's on their opinions of themes being included with Gnome as well as the ability of users to change the look and feel.
http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et -al-rotting-in-threes/ [wordpress.com]
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday April 15 2014, @09:18PM
To be fair, the GNOME dev/PR flak/whatever that was working his ass off defending GNOME in the Slashdot discussion [slashdot.org] about this was very polite. Of course, he was still arguing that no configurability is ideal, that good defaults should justify the removal of all configuration, including changing font sizes, and that if you really want to modify something you should just use extensions and edit the registry -- I mean gsettings.
But he was very nice while being obtuse and telling everybody how wrong they were.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday April 16 2014, @12:26AM
Being able to configure the environment is one of the best parts. Windows is a joke in comparison.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Wednesday April 16 2014, @01:37AM
Both are a joke compared to KDE, though, which actually exposes most of the configurability via GUI. No need to muck around with the command line or obscure registry-like crap just to get the environment usable and to taste.
Which was my point -- Gnome aped the Windows style of obfuscating configuration, but worse, and then they defend it and tell people they're wrong for wanting to change font sizes.