Thanks to a donation of up to $1,000,000 over the next two years the GNOME Foundation is recruiting for four positions including one for a core developer of the GTK+ toolkit and another for a DevOps Engineer/SysAdmin.

Since its inception in 1997 by Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero, who were university students at the time, GNOME has become one of the largest open source projects. It is best known for its desktop, which is a key part of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian, SuSE and Fedora. The project also has a long history of producing critical pieces of software infrastructure: common parts of countless open source systems and its software is found in televisions, e-book readers, in-vehicle infotainment systems, medical devices and much more.

GNOME has also been a key player in the social evolution of the free software community. By founding the Outreach Program for Women (OPW), GNOME pioneered a program to help make its community more gender diverse. That program expanded its scope to encourage more types of diversity and has been adopted by many other open source projects and has evolved into the larger Outreachy program = run outside of GNOME.

Relying on unpaid contributors, the GNOME project has been the training ground for software engineers and contributors who have gone on to play important roles elsewhere including Google, Apple, Microsoft and beyond. Membership of the GNOME Foundation, the non-profit organization that furthers the goal of creating a free software computing platform, is open to all GNOME contributors and its annually elected Board of Directors are all contributing members.

The GNOME Foundation benefits for support from many organizations, both open source and commercial:

In May the GNOME Foundation announced that an anonymous donor - possibly from one of the above or another organization (or even individual) that has benefited from it had pledged up to a million dollars, some of which would be matching funds. It was also stated that this would be used to increase staff to streamline operations and to grow its support of the GNOME Project and the surrounding ecosystem.

The latest announcement states:

The GNOME Foundation is pleased to be able to offer paid employment to exceptional people who have the drive to help us complete our mission – by broadening access to technology through the development and distribution of a usable free computer desktop software to people in countries around the world for whom operable computers would otherwise have been unavailable or prohibitively expensive. We do this primarily through support of the GNOME Desktop Environment, and associated technologies and projects.

The first of the posts available is a fund-raising role - important to ensure that matched funding is forthcoming to claim the entire donation and the second is an admin role. The other two are Devops and Linux Developer respectively:

Development Coordinator . This will ensure that we receive sufficient funds to continue our work delivering free software.

. This will ensure that we receive sufficient funds to continue our work delivering free software. Program Coordinator . The Program Coordinator will free up time from those involved in organizational, administrative and logistical problems.

. The Program Coordinator will free up time from those involved in organizational, administrative and logistical problems. Devops/Sysadmin . The systems and services we run need proper maintenance and care. As Flathub [An app store and build service for Linux] continues to grow, more support is needed to achieve this.

. The systems and services we run need proper maintenance and care. As Flathub [An app store and build service for Linux] continues to grow, more support is needed to achieve this. GTK+ core developer. GTK+ is core to our entire platform. Investing in development and maintenance of this toolkit will benefit the whole GNU/Linux ecosystem.

Neil McGovern, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation commented:

"These positions are key to ensuring that the Foundation remains sustainable and that we are able to support the community in key areas."

More Information

GNOME Foundation opens recruitment for further expansion

GNOME Foundation positions available

Anonymous Donor Pledges $1M Donation Over Two Years

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