The GNOME Foundation announced today that Google and Motorola have joined the organization's advisory board and will sponsor ongoing development of the open source desktop environment. The foundation says that the new funding will be used to facilitate usability studies and improvements to localization and accessibility.

The advisory board has no direct authority over the GNOME project, but it provides guidance to the foundation's elected board of directors. The advisory board consists of non-profit organizations that are invited to join at no cost as well as corporations that make an annual financial contribution of $5,000 or $10,000 depending on the size of the company. The current lineup of corporate members includes Canonical, Novell, Red Hat, IBM, HP, Intel, Imendio, ACCESS, and several others.

Google is a major investor in open source software and also sponsors the efforts of the Linux Foundation and other similar groups. Google has already funded a lot of GNOME development through its annual Summer of Code program and uses the GNOME desktop environment internally on Ubuntu workstations. In a statement issued today, Google's Chris DiBona said that the search giant is "pleased to continue our collaboration with the GNOME Foundation through our membership on the Foundation's Advisory Board."

Motorola uses the GNOME mobile technologies in its Linux-based MOTOMAGX platform which is LiMo-compatible and ships on a variety of handsets. "For mobile Linux, Motorola believes in open standards and open source technologies," said Motorola software platforms vice president Christy Wyatt in a statement. "The Gnome Foundation allows us to expand our reach to the vibrant Gnome communities and be active in projects that we currently utilize from the Gnome stack, SQLite, gStreamer, and Bluez to name a few."

Oddly enough, Motorola's decision to join the GNOME Foundation follows shortly after news that the handset maker is shifting its focus to Android, which uses a Java-base middleware stack and doesn't leverage any components of the GNOME Mobile platform. Motorola's decision to join the GNOME Foundation could be a sign that Motorola's commitment to MOTOMAGX isn't going to be entirely abandoned as the company experiments with Android.

The GNOME project is gaining a lot of momentum, especially in the mobile space. Various technologies associated with GNOME are used in Maemo, ALP, MOTOMAGX, Moblin, Ubuntu Mobile, and OLPC's Sugar environment. The addition of Google and Motorola to the lineup of GNOME supporters is further evidence that Linux is making headway on the desktop and on handheld devices.