GNOME Foundation Announces Cost Cutting Measures Due To Budget Woes

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME Foundation Announces Cost Cutting Measures Due To Budget Woes

While the recently-departed GNOME Foundation Executive Director in the summer statement was described as "drafting a bold five-year strategic plan for the Foundation, securing two important fiscal sponsorship agreements with GIMP and Black Python Devs, writing our first funding proposal that will now enable the Foundation to apply for more grants, vastly improving our financial operations, and implementing a break-even budget to preserve our financial reserves." It turns out that wasn't enough. The GNOME Foundation today announced some new cost-cutting measures for the project overseeing the open-source GNOME desktop...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Cost-Cutting-2024

[ElectricPrism]

Why couldn't they have just done a rain dance?

[Daktyl198]

Did the government fund they got not line up at least somewhat with their already existing goals? I know that donation was targeted at specific areas, but that still counts as a donation income to pay most of the same developers/staff right? You just re-focus their energy.

It's so weird to see that Gnome is struggling for money despite being backed by Red Hat, meanwhile KDE who doesn't have a backing company currently has too much money do to a large influx of money a year or two ago. Maybe people are less-likely to donate if they see the Red Hat backing? They think Gnome doesn't need the money despite being a separate entity? Either way, I wish well for the Gnome team and their fundraising efforts.

[bkdwt]

12345

[furtadopires]

I'm just posting here before the 8th page

[spicfoo]

Did the government fund they got not line up at least somewhat with their already existing goals? I know that donation was targeted at specific areas, but that still counts as a donation income to pay most of the same developers/staff right? You just re-focus their energy.

Nope. You cannot use STF funds outside of the specific projects they agreed to. There is no funding from STF for Flathub or conferences for example.

It's so weird to see that Gnome is struggling for money despite being backed by Red Hat, meanwhile KDE who doesn't have a backing company currently has too much money do to a large influx of money a year or two ago.

You are overstating the influence of Red Hat and confusing GNOME Project and GNOME foundation. GNOME foundation is just the legal entity responsible for trademarks, running conferences and such. Also KDE benefits heavily by Qt Company (which has hundreds of developers working on the Qt toolkit) and BlueSystems which employees a good number of KDE developers.

[Quackdoc]

I hope this leads to gnome doing some deep introspection to try and find what really matters with the money given to them

[Beryesa]

Is there a point in key events if they don't raise more than the costs?
Don't they exist to attract contributors and donations?

[peppercats]

What Is Unaffected

Internships

We have secured funding to continue our participation in Outreachy

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

If done really well, a position like Director of Community Development seems like it could be important. I.e. a bunch of excellent community engagement that draws in more volunteer contributors.