The money will be invested in the growth of the project

May 25, 2018 22:16 GMT  ·  By

It's a great day to be a GNOME developer as someone just pledged to donate $1,000,000 over the next two years to the non-profit GNOME Foundation, the driving force behind the widely-used GNOME desktop environment.

The donation was made by an anonymous person, though the money will be received by the GNOME Foundation over the next couple of years. Honored by this gesture, the team pledges to use the money to hire more developers and streamline their operations to improve the GNOME desktop environment.

"We are honored by the trust given to us and will work hard to justify that trust. This particular donation will enable us to support the GNOME project more widely, and tackle key challenges that the free software community faces," said Neil McGovern, Executive Director of GNOME Foundation.

GNOME Project to soon announce the areas of investment

McGovern said that the while the GNOME Foundation was able to maintain its position as leader of the GNOME project over the years, it didn't manage to grow as fast as they'd hoped. Thanks to this anonymous donation, they'll be able to expand their operations with the promise to become leaders of the free software movement.

The GNOME Foundation is already sponsored by many big names in the industry, among which we can mention Red Hat, Canonical, Google, Free Software Foundation, Debian, SUSE, The Document Foundation, Sugar Labs, Endless Computers, Private Internet Access, and System76, all part of the GNOME Advisory Board.

In the coming weeks, the GNOME Foundation will release more details about this generous donation, along with more information on how they plan to invest the $1,000,000. However, donations don't stop here, as the project hopes to see more generous donations in the years to come.

GNOME is currently one of the most used desktop environment amongst Linux users. Canonical recently adopted GNOME as the default session for its popular Ubuntu operating system, and Purism plans to use a mobile variant of GNOME as default user interface in their upcoming Librem 5 Linux smartphone.