Big day for GNOME developers as someone pledges to give away $1.000.000 over the next two years at the non-profit GNOME Foundation, the motivating power behind the well known desktop environment.
The donation will be made by someone who does not want publicity, and the GNOME Foundation will receive the money in the next two years. The GNOME development team committed to using the money to hire more developers to improve the Desktop Environment.
“This specific donation will allow us to support the GNOME project more broadly and address the key challenges facing the open source community software", said ο Neil McGovern, Executive Director του GNOME Foundation.
McGovern said that although the GNOME Foundation managed to stay high in user preferences, it failed to grow as fast as it hoped. But thanks to this anonymous donation, he will be able to expand his business with the promise of becoming a leader in the free software movement.
GNOME Foundation is already supported by many big names, among which we can mention the following: Red Hat, Canonical, Google, Free Software Foundation, Debian, SUSE, The Document Foundation, Sugar Labs, Endless Computers, Private Internet Access, and System76. All of the above companies are members of the GNOME Advisory Board.
In the coming weeks, the GNOME Foundation will announce more details about the donation, along with more information on how they plan to invest 1.000.000 dollars. However, donations do not stop here, as the project hopes to see more donations in the coming years.
GNOME is currently one of the most used desktop environments among Linux users. Canonical recently adopted GNOME as its default Ubuntu desktop, and Purism plans to use a variant of GNOME as the default desktop on the upcoming Librem 5 Linux smartphone.
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