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The incredibly boring, totally reasonable finances of the GNOME Foundation
Frugal. Transparent. Focused on their core business.
December 28, 2022
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I recently reported on the incredibly bizarre finances of Mozilla (the makers of Firefox). Payments to nonexistent companies, major payments to political extremists (that have no relation to their core business), a total reliance on a single customer… and that’s just for starters. The finances of Mozilla are absolutely wild.

Which brings up a question:

How does that compare to the financial operations of other “non-profit” organizations in the Tech and Open Source world?

Are the finances of other organizations similarly corrupt and strange? Or is Mozilla… unique?

In order to (begin to) answer that question, I dove into the available financial data of the GNOME Foundation — the Non-Profit Foundation behind the GNOME Desktop Environment (among many other software projects).

What I found was shockingly boring. Full transparency. Reasonable salaries and expenditures. Not one drop of anything even remotely controversial, shady, or questionable.

In other words… the exact opposite of Mozilla.

Read on to be utterly bored by the reasonableness of The GNOME Foundation… IF YOU DARE.

What does The GNOME Foundation actually do?

GNOME is, without question, the most commonly used Desktop Environment on Linux operating systems in 2022. It provides the default experience for the majority of the most popular Linux variants in existence (including Ubuntu).

But what, exactly, does the GNOME Foundation do? What is the Foundation’s role in all of this?

In their own words…

The GNOME Foundation is a non-profit organization that works to support the GNOME project.

 

Together we create a computing platform, composed entirely of free software, that is designed to be elegant, efficient, and easy to use. To achieve this goal, the Foundation coordinates releases and determines what software to include in these releases.

 

The Foundation provides the infrastructure necessary to building a technical project, including email services, hosting servers, and software for collaboration.

 

The Foundation acts as an official voice for the GNOME project, providing a means of communication with the community, media, and commercial and noncommercial organizations interested in GNOME software.

The Foundation produces educational materials and documentation to help the public learn about GNOME software.

 

In addition, it sponsors and helps organize GNOME related conferences, such as GUADEC, GNOME.Asia, and the Pan African GNOME Summit; represents GNOME at relevant conferences sponsored by others; helps create technical standards for the project; and promotes the use and development of GNOME software.

Infrastructure, release coordination, documentation and educational materials, conferences…

A good, clear list of services. All of which are clearly focused on the core business and market of GNOME.

How much money does the GNOME Foundation take in?

Now that we know what The GNOME Foundation sets out to accomplish… let’s take a look at how much money they take in with the purpose of accomplishing their goals.

Here are the breakdowns, for both 2020 and 2021, according to the GNOME Foundation annual report:

In 2020, The GNOME Foundation brought in a total of $925,189 dollars (USD). In 2021… that number dropped substantially. Down to $286,708.

One heck of a drop.

While that decrease in income is not a great thing… there’s nothing shady there. Simply a down year in terms of donations. As the Foundation stated in their report:

“The income for 2021 was a bit higher than projected. While down significantly from 2020, that was to be expected as 2021 did not have any high stakes events and the pandemic did not allow for many in-person events”

Here’s an important bit: All of these numbers are confirmed (at least for 2020) by the publicly available 990 forms from the IRS. (We don’t have the full 990 forms from the IRS for 2021 yet… thanks to the IRS being very, very slow.)

How much money do they spend?

Like with their income, The Gnome Foundation has provided clear breakdowns of their annual expenditures.

You’ll note that total expenses were actually higher in 2021. Which is concerning, considering the decreased income.

“While we spent less money in 2021 for conferences and other in-person events, we had directed funds that needed to be spent on specific programming items like the community challenge. Reduced staffing mid-year led to a slight decrease for staff spending for the year.”

For those of you doing the math at home, you’ll notice a little potential issue.

The GNOME Foundation brought in $286 Thousand in 2021… and they spent $926 Thousand. That means they spent $640 Thousand dollars more than they earned. Not great. How did they pull that off?

Digging into their 990 for 2019 and 2020 provided the answer: They had some money in the bank. You know. For a rainy day.

Specifically $1.8 Million in the bank. Which more than covered their losses in 2021.

While a loss year like that is not fun for any company or foundation… they happen. Just hopefully not too often.

Looking deeper into where the expenditures go reveals an organization that is quite frugal.

For example: The Executive Director of the Foundation earns a yearly salary of almost exactly $100,000 USD.

By comparison, the head of Mozilla earned $5.6 Million.

Note: You could make the argument that the head of Mozilla deserves to earn more because of the larger total market share of Firefox. Except… the difference between GNOME and Firefox, in terms of total users, is actually not all that dramatic. Firefox has a market share of around 3% (across all operating systems). Linux has almost the exact same market share (slightly less)… with GNOME being the dominant Desktop Environment. While it’s difficult to pin down, precisely, a good “from the hip” estimation would put the GNOME user-base at roughly half of Firefox’s. Give or take.

And, heck, a senior software developer or engineering management position in the United States is going to be able to earn far more than $100,000 yearly. $100k is nothing to sneeze at, to be sure, but is a potential drop in terms of what the same person could earn elsewhere.

Which means: The Executive Director of The GNOME Foundation is (most likely) sacrificing some of his earning potential in order to be able to work at GNOME.

At present, other than an Executive Director, there are 6 staff members of the Foundation. Which means the average salary of a Foundation employee is going to be less than $100k.

And, here’s something that struck me: No major discretionary spending. With GNOME, every dollar spent seems to be accounted for and earmarked for specific purposes — with clear relationships to the core business.

Reasonable salaries. No shady spending. All very carefully spelled out.

If anything, some of their staff probably could use a raise.

Seriously? There’s no shady stuff going on?

I warned you: Boring.

I can’t find a single objectionable thing in either their annual report or their filings with the IRS.

No bizarre business dealings whatsoever. Every dollar accounted for. All spending is very reasonable — and, importantly, all focused on their core mission and business.

I have a few take-aways from this:

  • This makes me more comfortable in donating to the GNOME Foundation… I know that my donated dollars will be used carefully.

  • It stands in stark contrast to the concerning, bizarre financials of Mozilla.

  • I now am curious: Is Mozilla the oddity for being so strange and shady? Or is GNOME the oddity for being so frugal, transparent, and focused on their core business? This may require some additional research to determine the answer to that question.

I’ll be honest. I’ve had a few criticisms of GNOME in the past — both in terms of the technical aspects of the Desktop Environment and related software… and of the running of the community and Foundation.

But, after doing some digging — and finding their operations and financials to be so utterly reasonable and boring — I am finding that I am having increasingly positive feelings towards them.

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Microsoft “Worker Intifada” Escalates, 18 Arrested, More Violence Planned
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“The “Intifada” organizers made the following statement on X, following yesterday’s arrests:

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Current workers, former workers, and community members were hog-tied, violently dragged, and pepper sprayed in a repressive escalation. Microsoft and Redmond Police chose to dehumanize, brutalize, and criminalize people of conscience for opposing Microsoft's ACTUAL war crimes.

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The “Worker Intifada” has previously declared their intention to escalate their activities, stating “we will not rest”, “we will continue to escalate”, and that they will engage in activities which “cannot be ignored”.

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Worker Intifada Occupies Microsoft Main Campus, Demands MS Cut All Ties With Israel
The group has declared an intention to occupy Microsoft East Campus Plaza until Microsoft cuts ties with “the murderous Zionists” and pays “reparations” for “AI Genocide”.

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Photo credit: https://x.com/thestustustudio/status/1957924513938620743

The “Worker Intifada” made the following statement today:

“We will not be cogs in the I​s​r​a​e​l​i​ genocidal machine: a call for a Worker I​n​t​i​f​a​d​a": in a company-wide email to workers and leadership, Microsoft worker Julius Shan shared reminders of the company's complicity and announced the establishment of a Liberated Zone at the M​a​r​t​y​red P​a​l​e​s​t​i​n​i​a​n​​ Children's Plaza. Julius also called on fellow workers to join the global Worker Intifada, by escalating against Microsoft everywhere until all demands from the Liberated Zone are met. Read the full declaration from the Liberated Zone at: http://noaa.cc/worker-intifada

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Photo Credit: https://x.com/thestustustudio/status/1957921589628113380

The “Worker Intifada”, in their statements (both written and verbal), repeatedly make known false statements and blood libel regarding Israel — and repeatedly use phrases common among anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli terrorist groups.

What follows are images of some of the statements made by this “Microsoft Worker Intifada”. Presented, without comment.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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MS Office for PowerPC Windows NT Found!
You can now run Windows NT (with Office) on a Nintendo Wii & an original iMac. Seriously. That's a real thing.

There are two things that bring me an unreasonable amount of joy:

  1. The discovery of long-lost software.

  2. Running software on hardware it was never intended to run on.

This story has both. I am positively giddy.

Microsoft Office for PowerPC

It is a well known fact that Windows NT was developed (and, in some cases, released) for multiple CPU architectures beyond the common x86 — including MIPS, DEC Alpa, and PowerPC.

In addition to Windows NT, Microsoft developed and released versions of Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) for those hardware platforms. Not much good having the operating system for a particular CPU… if you don’t have some software to run on it, right?

We’ve had public archives of Microsoft Office for both MIPS and Alpha CPUs for quite some time… but the PowerPC version of Office has, for whatever reason, remained elusive.

Until this week, when Antoni Sawicki got his hands on the long-lost Office for PPC.

Image
 

Antoni was alerted to an eBay listing of a boxed copy of MS Office 6.0. A box which, intriguingly, listed all four of the released Windows NT CPU architectures.

As Antoni said, “Since it clearly said PowerPC on the box I got it… and here it is:”

Image
 

Check out that screenshot. Windows NT 4.0, running on a PPC 604 processor (with 32 MB of RAM)… running a native version of Microsoft Word 6.0.

The archive for the PowerPC version of Office is now hosted at VirtuallyFun.com. A major win for computer history preservation.

Now, buckle up, Buttercup. Because it gets weirder. And more awesome.

Windows NT For Wii & PowerMac

The archiving of historical software is, without question, important. But being able to actually run that software — on easily obtainable hardware — allows people to experience that part of computer history.

And, thanks to one developer, you can run Windows NT 3.51 and 4.0 on Nintendo GameCube, Wii, & WiiU as well as PPC Macintoshes like the original iMac and iBook.

That’s right. Apple’s original, clamshell, “bondi blue” G3 iBook can run Windows NT 4.0.

An iBook G3 Clamshell with the about menu for Windows NT 4.0 open.
 

Not emulated. Native. On “bare metal”.

In theory, it should be able to run the PowerPC native version of Office 6.0 as well. Something I will need to be testing, for myself, very soon.

Now, you may be asking, “Why would I install Windows NT and Office on a Nintendo Wii”?

And, while there are many valid reasons for undertaking such an endeavor — including that whole “experiencing computer history first hand” thing we talked about — there is one purpose for running MS Word on a GameCube that eclipses all others:

Because we can.

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