Update from the GNOME President.
The GNOME Foundation is refusing to talk to me directly -- but my article is causing a bit of a firestorm, which has forced the GNOME President to publish a few, small updates.
https://discourse.gnome.org/t/update-from-the-board/20653/5
Some of those updates confirm my reporting: "the reserves policy says we should keep 12 additional months of staff salary and expenses".
Based on the math... this seemed likely to be their policy. Now that's confirmed. This also means the math I laid out within the last article is, likely, not too far off from what their books really look like.
There are also two interesting statements that I'm going to be following up on:
"The reason we’re hoping to raise more funds is our ambition to do more for the community"
"This year we’re expecting to break-even"
Overall this could be good news for the GNOME Foundation. However... these statements sound good, but are incredibly vague and speculative.
The fact that they've been running such a large deficit for several years (with the books showing a trajectory towards a fully depleted savings) -- and the fact that they were forced to announce a spending freeze, and verify the savings levels -- suggests to me that all is not roses and happy dances. I am reaching out to see if we can get some additional details... but, given the GNOME Foundation's lack of communication and transparency, I doubt we'll really know the true extent of the financial issues until we get the current year's IRS records... or until we hear about layoffs.
Either way, I will add an update to the end of my article on the topic to include what we know to date.
UPDATE: I've appended this information to the end of this article:
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5572069/is-the-gnome-foundation-going-to-go-bankrupt-in-1-year
