The lead section of this article may need to be rewritten. The reason given is: Too short, one sentence is not enough.(June 2023) |
Founded | 5 March 2001 [1] |
---|---|
Type | 501(c)(3) [2] [1] |
Location | |
Product | GNOME |
Revenue (2021) | $298,297 [3] |
Expenses | $850,347 [3] |
Employees | 4 [3] |
Volunteers | 200 [3] |
Website | foundation |
GNOME Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Orinda, California, United States, which works to coordinate the efforts in the GNOME project.
The GNOME Foundation works to further the goal of the GNOME project: to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is composed entirely of free software. It was founded on 5 March 2001 [1] by Compaq, Eazel, Helix Code, IBM, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, and VA Linux Systems. [4]
To achieve this goal, the foundation coordinates releases of GNOME and determines which projects are a part of GNOME. The foundation acts as an official voice for the GNOME project, providing a means of communication with the press and with commercial and noncommercial organizations interested in GNOME software. The foundation produces educational materials and documentation to help the public learn about GNOME software. In addition, it sponsors GNOME-related technical conferences, such as GUADEC, GNOME.Asia, and the Boston Summit, represents GNOME at relevant conferences sponsored by others, helps create technical standards for the project, and promotes the use and development of GNOME software.[ citation needed ]
The GNOME Executive Director is selected and hired by the GNOME Board of Directors. [5]
Between 2008 and 2010, Stormy Peters served as the foundation's executive director. [6] [7] She was replaced in June 2011 by Karen Sandler, [8] who served until March 2014. [9] Following Sandler's departure, the GNOME Board announced that cash reserves had been drained due to a cash flow problem, as the GNOME Foundation had to front the costs of late payments from sponsors of the 'Outreach Program for Women'. [10] Spending for non-essential activities was therefore frozen to allow the cash reserves to recover throughout 2014. [11] This led to various rumors that the GNOME foundation had gone bankrupt, which the GNOME foundation has clarified never happened. [12]
The executive director position remained unfilled until February 2017, when former Debian leader Neil McGovern was appointed. [13] In February 2022, Neil McGovern resigned as executive director of the GNOME Foundation. [14] [15] [16] A call for job applications was opened for the executive director role in August 2022, [17] and was subsequently reopened with a modified job description in May 2023. [18]
The current executive director, Holly Million, was announced on 17 October 2023. [19]
The foundation's board of directors is elected every year via elections held by the GNOME Foundation Election Committee. In 2016/2017, board members are: Alexandre Franke, Allan Day, Cosimo Cecchi, Jim Hall, Meg Ford, Nuritzi Sanchez, and Shaun McCance.[ needs update ] [20]
All GNOME contributors can apply for Foundation membership. All members are eligible to stand for the Board of Directors, vote in Board elections, and suggest referendum for voting. [21]
The foundation's Advisory Board is a body of organizations and companies that wish to communicate and work closely with the board of directors and the GNOME project. Organizations may join the advisory board for an annual fee of between US$11500 and US$23000, or be invited as a non-profit.
As of 2021 [update] , Advisory Board members include: Canonical Ltd., Debian, Endless Computer, Google, Red Hat, Sugar Labs, SUSE, The Document Foundation and System76. [22]
In September 2019, Rothschild Patent Imaging (RPI) filed a lawsuit against GNOME Foundation claiming that Shotwell infringed on its patent because "[Shotwell] imports and filters photographic images from cameras, allowing users to organise the photos and share them on social media". GNOME Foundation called allegations baseless and started a defense aimed not just to defend Shotwell, but to invalidate the patents in question altogether. [23] To finance the defense, GNOME launched GNOME Patent Troll Defense Fund. [24] On 23 October 2019, Debian Foundation publicly stated their support for GNOME Foundation and urged users to donate to the fund. [25] In October 2019, Open Innovation Network announced that their lawyers would assist help GNOME Foundation in discovery process to find prior art to invalidate the patent claims. [26] The GNOME Patent Troll Defense fund received support of over 4000 contributors and surpassed the original goal of US$125,000. [27]
On 20 May 2020, GNOME Foundation announced resolution of the patent case. The sides have settled on the following conditions: [28]
Thus Rothschild Patent Imaging and Leigh Rothschild keep their original patent, but GNOME Foundation and any project released under OSI-approved license is immune from any future patent claims made by Rothschild Patent Imaging and Leigh Rothschild.
The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is a desktop environment for Unix and OpenVMS, based on the Motif widget toolkit. It was part of the UNIX 98 Workstation Product Standard, and was for a long time the Unix desktop associated with commercial Unix workstations. It helped to influence early implementations of successor projects such as KDE and GNOME desktop environment, which largely replaced CDE following the turn of the century.
Debian, also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of Debian (0.01) was released on September 15, 1993, and its first stable version (1.1) was released on June 17, 1996. The Debian Stable branch is the most popular edition for personal computers and servers. Debian is also the basis for many other distributions, most notably Ubuntu, Pardus, Linux Mint.
Open-source licenses facilitate free and open-source software (FOSS) development. Intellectual property (IP) laws restrict the modification and sharing of creative works. Free and open-source software licenses use these existing legal structures for the inverse purpose of granting freedoms that promote sharing and collaboration. They grant the recipient the rights to use the software, examine the source code, modify it, and distribute the modifications. These licenses target computer software where source code can be necessary to create modifications. They also cover situations where there is no difference between the source code and the executable program distributed to end users. Open-source licenses can cover hardware, infrastructure, drinks, books, and music.
Xfce or XFCE is a free and open-source desktop environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.
GNOME Evolution is the official personal information manager for GNOME. It has been an official part of GNOME since Evolution 2.0 was included with the GNOME 2.8 release in September 2004. It combines e-mail, address book, calendar, task list and note-taking features. Its user interface and functionality is similar to Microsoft Outlook. Evolution is free software licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
Skolelinux/Debian-Edu is a Linux distribution intended for educational use and a Debian Pure Blend. The free and open source software project was founded in Norway in 2001 and is now being internationally developed. Its name is a direct translation of "school linux" from Norwegian, skole being derived from the Latin word schola.
Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open-source software development. It is aimed at developers and anyone interested in the free and open-source software movement. It aims to enable developers to meet and to promote the awareness and use of free and open-source software.
This comparison only covers software licenses which have a linked Wikipedia article for details and which are approved by at least one of the following expert groups: the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, the Debian Project and the Fedora Project. For a list of licenses not specifically intended for software, see List of free-content licences.
gNewSense was a Linux distribution, active from 2006 to 2016. It was based on Debian, and developed with sponsorship from the Free Software Foundation. Its goal was user-friendliness, but with all proprietary and non-free software removed. The Free Software Foundation considered gNewSense to be composed entirely of free software.
Linux Mint is a community-driven Linux distribution based on Ubuntu, bundled with a variety of free and open-source applications. It can provide full out-of-the-box multimedia support for those who choose to include proprietary software such as multimedia codecs. Compared to Ubuntu, it uses the Cinnamon interface by default, using a different, more traditional layout that can be customized by dragging the applets and creating panels. New applets can also be downloaded.
Stormy Peters is an information technology industry analyst and prominent free and open source software (FOSS) advocate, promoting business use of FOSS. She advocates as a consultant and conference speaker. She co-founded, and was later appointed as executive director of the GNOME Foundation. She previously worked for Mozilla Corporation, Cloud Foundry, and Red Hat. In August 2019 she joined Microsoft.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft terms, such as with its own GNU General Public License. The FSF was incorporated in Boston, Massachusetts, US, where it is also based.
GNOME, originally an acronym for GNU Network Object Model Environment, is a free and open-source desktop environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.
Shotwell is an image organizer designed to provide personal photo management for the GNOME desktop environment. In 2010, it replaced F-Spot as the standard image tool for several GNOME-based Linux distributions, including Fedora in version 13 and Ubuntu in its 10.10 Maverick Meerkat release.
Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc. is an organization that provides a non-profit home and infrastructure support for free and open source software projects. The organization was established in 2006, and as of June 2022, had over 40 member projects.
Karen Sandler is the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, former executive director of the GNOME Foundation, an attorney, and former general counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center. She holds an honorary doctorate from KU Leuven.
GNOME Project is a community behind the GNOME desktop environment and the software platform upon which it is based. It consists of all the software developers, artists, writers, translators, other contributors, and active users of GNOME. It is no longer part of the GNU Project.
Outreachy (previously the Free and Open Source Software Outreach Program for Women) is a program that organizes three-month paid internships with free and open-source software projects for people who are typically underrepresented in those projects. The program is organized by the Software Freedom Conservancy and was formerly organized by The GNOME Project and the GNOME Foundation.
Open source license litigation involves lawsuits surrounding open-source licensed software. Many of the legal rights of open source software licensors enforceable against users violating licensing agreements are untested by the U.S. legal system. Free and open source software (FOSS) is distributed under a variety of free-software licenses, which are unique among other software licenses. Legal action against open source licenses involves questions about their validity and enforceability.