The GNOME Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...

, United States, coordinating the efforts in the GNOME

GNOME

GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software...

 project.

Purpose

The GNOME Foundation works to further the goal of the GNOME project: to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is completely free software

Free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

.

To achieve this goal, the Foundation coordinates releases of GNOME and determines which projects are part of GNOME. The Foundation acts as an official voice for the GNOME project, providing a means of communication with the press and with commercial and noncommercial organizations interested in GNOME software. The foundation may produce educational materials and documentation to help the public learn about GNOME software. In addition, it may sponsor GNOME-related technical conferences, such as GUADEC

GUADEC

The GNOME Users And Developers European Conference, is an annual conference taking place in Europe, whose topic is the development of the GNOME desktop environment....

 and Boston Summit, represent GNOME at relevant conferences sponsored by others, help create technical standards for the project, and promote the use and development of GNOME software.

Management

As of June 2011, Karen Sandler

Karen Sandler

Karen Sandler is the executive director of the GNOME Foundation, an attorney, and former general counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center.-Work in Free Software:As of June 2011, Karen Sandler is executive director of the GNOME Foundation....

 is the Foundation's executive director

Executive director

Executive director is a term sometimes applied to the chief executive officer or managing director of an organization, company, or corporation. It is widely used in North American non-profit organizations, though in recent decades many U.S. nonprofits have adopted the title "President/CEO"...

. The Executive Director is selected and hired by the GNOME Board of Directors.

Board of directors

The Foundation's Board of Directors is elected every year via election held by GNOME Foundation Election Committee.

Current (since July 2011) Board Members are Brian Cameron, Emmanuele Bassi, Ryan Lortie, Shaun McCance, Bastien Nocera, Stormy Peters, Germán Póo-Caamaño.

Notable former board members

• Nat Friedman
  Nat Friedman
  Nathaniel Dourif Friedman , known as Nat, is a programmer who co-founded Ximian along with Miguel de Icaza in 1999, a company that was later bought by Novell in 2003....
  
   (2001–2003)
• Jim Gettys
  Jim Gettys
  Jim Gettys is an American computer programmer at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, USA. Until January 2009, he was the Vice President of Software at the One Laptop per Child project, working on the software for the OLPC XO-1. He is one of the original developers of the X Window System at MIT and worked on...
  
   (2000–2002)
• Miguel de Icaza
  Miguel de Icaza
  Miguel de Icaza is a Mexican free software programmer, best known for starting the GNOME and Mono projects.-Early years:Miguel de Icaza was born in Mexico City and studied at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México but never received a degree. He came from a family of scientists in which his...
  
   (2000–2002)
• Raph Levien
  Raph Levien
  Raphael Levien is an influential member of the free software developer community, through his creation of the Advogato virtual community and his work with the free software branch of Ghostscript. He is currently employed by Google...
  
   (2000–2001)
• Michael Meeks (2001)
• Federico Mena Quintero (2000–2001, 2004–2005)
• Havoc Pennington
  Havoc Pennington
  Robert Sanford Havoc Pennington is an American computer engineer and entrepreneur.He is known in the free software community due to his work on HAL , GNOME, Metacity, GConf, and D-BUS.- Career :...
  
   (2000–2001)

Membership

All GNOME contributors can apply to be a member of the Foundation. All members are eligible to stand for the Board of Directors, vote in the Board elections and suggest referenda for voting.

Advisory board

The Foundation's Advisory Board is a body of organisations and companies that wish to communicate closely with the Board of Directors and the GNOME project. Organisations may join the advisory board for an annual fee of between US$5000 and US$10000, or be invited as a non-profit.

, Advisory Board members include: Canonical Ltd.

Canonical Ltd.

Canonical Ltd. is a private company founded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth to market commercial support and related services for Ubuntu Linux and related projects. Canonical is registered in London and employs staff around the world...

, Debian

Debian

Debian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software primarily under the GNU General Public License along with other free software licenses. Debian GNU/Linux, which includes the GNU OS tools and Linux kernel, is a popular and influential...

, Free Software Foundation

Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software...

, Google

Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

, Hewlett-Packard

Hewlett-Packard

Hewlett-Packard Company or HP is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA that provides products, technologies, softwares, solutions and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including...

, IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...

, Igalia

Igalia

Igalia is a private company, based in Spain, known for their contributions to the GNOME project, their work in the Maemo and MeeGo platforms, and the WebKitGTK+ project....

, Intel, Motorola

Motorola

Motorola, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, which was eventually divided into two independent public companies, Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions on January 4, 2011, after losing $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009...

, Mozilla Foundation

Mozilla Foundation

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. The organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls trademarks and other intellectual property...

, Nokia

Nokia

Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational communications corporation that is headquartered in Keilaniemi, Espoo, a city neighbouring Finland's capital Helsinki...

, Novell

Novell

Novell, Inc. is a multinational software and services company. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Attachmate Group. It specializes in network operating systems, such as Novell NetWare; systems management solutions, such as Novell ZENworks; and collaboration solutions, such as Novell Groupwise...

, OLPC, Red Hat

Red Hat

Red Hat, Inc. is an S&P 500 company in the free and open source software sector, and a major Linux distribution vendor. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina with satellite offices worldwide....

, Software Freedom Law Center

Software Freedom Law Center

The Software Freedom Law Center is an organization that provides pro bono legal representation and related services to not-for-profit developers of free software/open source software. It was launched in February 2005 with Eben Moglen as Chairman. Initial funding of US$4 million was pledged by...

, Sugar Labs

Sugar Labs

Sugar Labs is a software-development and learning community.Sugar Labs is a non-profit foundation whose mission is to produce, distribute, and support the use of the Sugar learning platform. Sugar Labs supports the community of educators and software developers who want to extend the platform and...

 and Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...

.

External links

• The GNOME Foundation, the official website of the foundation