It is always sad watching a free project slowly becoming nonfree (as in beer). Sorry but we come to the point "Your donation will ensure that GNOME continues to be a free ..." and "You should donate before downloading" point is not that far I guess, 3 years? 4 years? Ok ok 5 years...
 

ZuLuuuuuu,

I don't think that's a fair assessment. GNOME is as free (beer and freedom) as it always was, and will remain that. There is no reason one would need to read our blogs when they want to download GNOME.

Many of us donate to many projects that we care about, and we believe there are many others in the community who will do the same if asked nicely.

Now what's wrong with trying to ask for more donations to get past a low year? Or maybe your rather see we close shop and go home?
 

"Your donation will ensure that GNOME continues to be a free ..." sentence states that "We won't be able to provide GNOME as free if no donations are made." and which leads to the conclusion "GNOME became a money dependent project.". This scares me about the future of GNOME, that's all.
 

The quotation says: "Your donation will ensure that GNOME continues to be a free and open source desktop...". The focus here is on the "be" part, not the "free" part. That's something we need to improve.

As for freedom, it's *guaranteed* that it will remain so. Not because I'm saying it or our charter says it, but because of our licensing model and our copyright holders. There is no single copyright holder to GNOME code. It's owned by tens of different companies and thousands of different individuals. Because of that, and thanks to the licenses we chose (GPL and LGPL mostly), there is NO WAY to make GNOME non-free, now or in the future.
 

Let gnome/GTK+ rest in peace already and support KDE, a real desktop environment.

I like Gnome, but sometimes you need to know when you have to let go of stuff in order for linux to 'survive'.
 

Dread Knight,

See my previous post?
http://mces.blogspot.com/2009/06/your-point-of-view.html
 

DROP DOT NET ASAP!

It's incredible how once upon a time there was a project (in it's initial stage, hello world, I'm KDE!) built on top of a proprietary toolkit (Qt 1.x), and a revolutionary crew of hackers all around the emerging FOSS world that got angry by that and started to work on a totally FLOSS implementation (GTK, GNOME).

GNOME matured well over the years, it's rock solid, powerful, simple enough to use for my grandmother...


BUT TODAY IS GOOD TO MICROSOFT IF YOU USE GNOME, personally, I used GTK, and it is not that bad, .net object orientation makes it sexier, of course, but it is way much more prehistoric than Qt4.5. Qt 4.5 now it's LGPL, just the same as the GNOME toolkit, so please, don't kill GNOME with a virtualized environment like java or C# (that is good for novice programmers, but a disaster to rest of us)

C++
FOSS
Good Hackers that dont go the dark side
(mr. Miguel de Icaza, the once FOSS hero, now what? Silverlight what? (lets kill adobe flash with HTML5) mono what?)

I personally love both GNOME and KDE although I am a Troll, I consider important and mandatory the existence at least of both projects (i dont forget xfce, blackbox, windowmaker, bla, bla, bla).

If you think like me, and see you are almost alone, LETS FORK GNOME, I WILL BE IN YOUR SIDE, I WILL CODE AT YOUR SIDE

Lets refactor GTK, lets do the C++ dance!
 

Hey,

Often imperceptibly the 'r' that makes the difference between 'free' and 'fee' drops due to the word 'donation'.

Sometimes one goes overboard, justifies donation, but I am glad to know that conscientious voices that favor 'free' are alert and speak aloud.

love
Ashok Koparday
 

"Your donation will ensure that GNOME continues to be a free and open source"
means that gnome is not sure that it will remain free and open source. Why would I donate to a project that holds open the possibility of charging people money?
 

I already answered that, please read the comments.
 

This comment has been removed by the author.
 

Well, GNOME could never be a paid version.
Due to it's license and some good people associated with it, GNOME will remain free and Open source.

I am a student and I've learned a lot from the open source codes. I really respect the Open source community

In the near future I'll surely support GNOME along with Open source community either by funding or by my programming skills.

BEST OF LUCK!!

Regards,
Mangat Rai
 

If at any point GNOME (or any other open source software) starts charging money, people who don't like it can just take the source code from there and make it a different project from there keeping the new project free. That's what GPL and other open licenses let you do.

Code is free. But hardware and communication are not. That's basically why open source needs money too. Besides, if someone decides to pay good developers rather than just taking them for granted, they can put more commitment into the project making it better. That's why we donate to open source.

You don't want your favourite programmer to deliver couriers part-time, just because he likes code to be free, do you?
 

@Dread Knight

I suggest you update your mind, your way of thinking is deprecated... KDE wouldn't be good if GNOME was not here..