14 DAY TRIAL // After receiving an annonymous donation of $1 million earlier this year, GNOME Foundation announced today that they received a generous donation from Handshake, a recently launched decentralized certificate authority and experimental peer-to-peer root DNS service.
The Handshake organization apparently launched today at handshake.org, and they already donated $10.2 million US dollars that they've collected from various project sponsors to several Free and Open Source Software projects, including GNOME Foundation, which received $300,000, and the GIMP project, which received the rest of $100,000 USD.
GNOME Foundation is the non-profit organization behind the popular GNOME desktop environment used by numerous Linux-based operating systems by default, including Ubuntu, or available in their software repositories. On the other hand, the GIMP Project is the creator of the famous GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) open-source image editing and viewing software for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows platforms.
"I am very grateful to Handshake for this pledge. Ensuring that free software can be sustainably funded is a key challenge, and this donation helps fund further development. Further, GNOME cares deeply about privacy and the ability for all to communicate securely and looks forward to further development in the Handshake project," said Neil McGovern, Executive Director of the Foundation.
A long overdue thank you to the Free and Open Source community
The Handshake team said that the donation of $400,000 US dollars is their way of saying a big thank you to the Free and Open Source community for their contributions to the world, as without these open source project Handshake wouldn't be possible. Moreover, the company said that the pledge ensures their economic gains will be directly beneficial to the open source community.
Among other open source projects that received donations from Handshake, we can mention the Apache Software Foundation, Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia), Free Software Foundation (FSF), FreeBSD, Creative Commons, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Let's Encrypt, GNU Project, ISC (BIND), IC3, and OpenBSD Foundation.
Additional donations were made to projects like the Internet Archive, FFMpeg, Babel, Caligra, Fight for the Future, LibreSSL, OpenSSL, NetBSD, LibreJS, Noisebridge, Give Directly, Open Source Initiative, Python Foundation, Ruby Together, Nodejs Foundation, Reproducible Builds, SFC / Outreachy, Scuttlebutt, systemd, and TOR Project.