gnome

Tech takes a central place in our lives. Banking, and administrative tasks are happening more and more online. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to get through life without a computer or a smartphone. They have become external organs necessary to live our life.

In the open source industry, creating an American nonprofit to serve and fund a project is not uncommon. These structures can choose a fiscal status depending on their needs within a wide range defined by the IRS. The 501(c)(3) status is widespread in the industry. These structures must follow specific legal and tax requirements, which means that sometimes, their interests can seem misaligned with the project they originate from.

The GNOME Foundation has been operating at a loss for several years and has a dysfunctional relationship with its community. As the Foundation started hitting its reserves, it needed to change course. A five-year Strategic Plan is a useful aspirational document that hints at the priorities, but it’s not an operational plan.

The GNOME community has become a Matrix-first community some time ago, and we kept the bridges to our historical IRC network gimpnet as a convenience for people who were more comfortable using it. The GNOME community is going to move away from GIMPnet… which doesn’t mean we’re going to severe ties with IRC entirely.

This article follows one published by a former director, Allan Day, who detailed the evolution of the Board of Directors. The article you’re reading goes further on what I believe is needed to help us scale the Foundation to become an active contributor to the GNOME Project, beyond its traditional support activities.

The topic of our Instant Messaging platform of choice is quite old. In May 2021 I covered the history of IRC and Matrix in the GNOME Community.

The GNOME Foundation has not been giving as much news as we wish it has, but doesn’t mean nothing happened!

This post follows an introduction to Matrix with e-mails, where I explain that Matrix is a federated system.

Following a blog post by GNOME Foundation’s president Robert McQueen about The Next Steps for the GNOME Foundation, GNOME Designer and Foundation’s board member Allan Day opened a discussion for the board to issue recommendations to the GNOME Foundation members when voting for a candidate.

Like many, I started my involvement in the GNOME community as an end-user. Eventually, I wanted to give back to this project I loved. I wanted to see both the project and the community strive. We already had and still have many excellent developers who work hard to implement the vision of our talented design team. Those are not areas where my contribution would make a difference. I started helping with translations. For this activity I have regularily been chasing maintainers for string freezes, or to ask for explanations when strings didn’t make sense for me.

First, of course, we know that despite what the spam indicated the spam did not actually come from Libera Chat teams. It comes from imbeciles who obviously wanted to give Libera Chat a bad image by flooding all sorts of disgusting messages.

I’ve come to talk with you about instant messaging platforms and peaceful coexistence. This is a pretty heated issue, so I count on everyone to keep the conversation constructive so we can shape our future platform together in a positive way!