When open source nonprofits ask for donations, one common answer is "I only want to fund code, I don't want to fund anything else." GNOME has created a Fellowship Program to fund direct work on GNOME, a program entirely funded by donations . This is a testament to the Foundation's maturity, as it becomes a direct contributor to the project it stewards.

Let's take a step back to address the code-only argument. It is a misguided reaction, but I can see where its proponents are coming from. In the world of proprietary software, you pay to get your software. You don't realize that this bundles the marketing, accounting, legal, and even HR costs.

In the open source world, everyone can see who contributes code and how that code is built and packaged to create a software solution. A lot of things are not shown in git commits though. A few of them are:

• What did it take to create the Human Interface Guidelines to have a coherent suite of applications? How many designers had to meet, what research did they have to do, did they have to meet in person?
• What did it take to create the Developer Documentation to onboard new developers, help them make their first steps, and turn them into bigger contributors over the years?
• What did it take to build a website to advertize all the cool apps that follow the GNOME HIG ?
• What did it take to set up the infrastructure the code lives on, and that builds the software we all love?

GNOME, like many other open source projects, is first and foremost a community. This is a group of people with diverse backgrounds, diverse opinions, who try to find common ground to solve problems. They don't always agree on how to solve problems, nor necessarily on what even is a problem in the first place.

The role of The GNOME Foundation is to provide a place to support its community. Its role is to help its contributors find common ground. Its role is to give them the tools and opportunities to do so.

Some people still don't value this, and want The GNOME Foundation to be a vendor for GNOME. They want to fund developers to produce code , because that's a very visible metric.

For them, and for everyone who's ever wanted to give back to GNOME without knowing how, The GNOME Foundation has created a Fellowship Program . It will directly fund a person to work on what few people want to do in their spare time: maintenance.

Round one focuses on sustainability: 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.

This is only fueled by our donations. If you want a direct pipeline between your money and GNOME development, this is it. Donate to GNOME , we can't afford not to have them when Big Tech has so much influence on our lives.