Earmarked donations let GNOME fund two fellows to modernize Files (Nautilus), improve tooling, and bolster project-level governance.
The Gnome Foundation has announced the first participants in the new Fellowship program it announced in March.
Although Gnome continues to struggle with funding, it’s been able to afford a new fellowship program to put money in the pockets of some volunteer coders without having to rob Peter to pay Pauline. They’ve been able to do this through some special donations earmarked specifically for the new program it’s calling the Gnome Foundation Fellowship program.
“Gnome depends on contributors who squeeze in work between commercial priorities, jobs, life, and everything else,” Gnome said in its launch announcement. “Critical components and infrastructure are often neglected because no one has time to maintain them. The Gnome Foundation Fellowship program is our response: direct funding for contributors to do the work that wouldn’t get done otherwise.”
The organization said that “fellows” would be compensated at the rate of $70,000 to $100,000 per year, with the exact amount being based on experience and location. At the time, Gnome said it had initial funding to support one person full-time or two people part-time, with fellows receiving funding for 12 months. Evidently, the organization decided to start with the latter, because late last week it announced two participants.
GNOME’s Newly Minted Fellows
In a post published Thursday by Gnome’s executive director Allan Day, the first two fellows were identified as Peter Eisenmann and Sophie Herold, and said they will start work in July.
“Sophie and Peter are both long-running Gnome contributors, with many significant contributions as members of the Gnome community,” Day said. “Sophie is known as a developer of apps, libraries, and websites, including Loupe, Pika Backup, Glycin, and welcome.gnome.org. Peter is a long-standing Nautilus maintainer (officially known as the Files app), as well as an experienced contributor to platform libraries, including GTK and GLib.”
When announcing the creation of the fellowship program in March, Gnome said it would be looking for coders to do some hard-core grunt work, with a focus on improving tooling, build systems, test infrastructure, automation, documentation, developer productivity, and ongoing maintainability. “We are not funding feature development: the goal is for each fellowship to leave the project in a more efficient and sustainable state.”
Those seem to be exactly the shoe’s that Day (and Gnome) are expecting Eisenmann and Herold to fill during their year-long stint.
“Both Fellows will spend time working to enhance the long-term sustainability and health of the Gnome project,” Day said. “Sophie will be working to establish a new RFC process for Gnome, which will enhance our project-level governance. She will also be working on more maintainable and secure libraries through Rust adoption. Peter will work to modernize many aspects of the Files app, including thumbnailing, user directory localization, and the use of modern Gnome platform conventions.”
GNOME’s Overall Finances
The overall financial situation at Gnome seems to be slowly returning to sustainability, with “slowly” being the key word.
Starting at about the beginning of the decade — and pretty much coinciding with Covid and the shutdown — Gnome began to run deficits and began to dip into its cash reserves. This became somewhat serious in 2024 when the organization ran against the limit of its reserves policy, which meant it could no longer operate under a deficit budget.
The resulting belt tightening led to a round of layoffs, that included Caroline Henriksen, Gnome’s creative director for nearly five years, and director of community development Melissa Wu. This also necessitated cutbacks in areas such as event organization and representation, marketing initiatives, fundraising efforts, and graphic design.
More recently, Gnome leadership has indicated that the organization is at about break-even on core operations and that it has roughly about a year’s reserves on hand. Additional funds — like donations and specific grants — make “extra” programs such as the fellowship program possible.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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