GNOME Foundation's First Quarterly Report

Up to now the foundation behind the free desktop has been reporting annually about their activities. Executive director Stormy Peters decided to issue quarterly reports, and this is its first. The GNOME Quarterly Report, an 18-page PDF, covers activities of the project teams for June, July and August 2009, and their joint work with companies such as Red Hat, Canonical and Sun. Also included is a brief page on income and expenses, with a lion's share of the $65,000 income coming from the Desktop Summit sponsorship fees at Gran Canaria, although the costs, income and expenses for the conference still need to be split with cosponsor KDE.

Further finances show that another $12,392 income came from the marketing team and their Friends of GNOME initiative. Spokesperson for the team Paul Cutler reported on the record-breaking success of the fundraising. The marketing team also plans a GNOME store for the third quarter for purchasing branded merchandise, as well as a worldwide press team to interact with the media.

Dave Neary reported on GNOME events and also acted as spokesperson for the GNOME Mobile team. He referred to the Nokia-Intel agreement and the release of GNOME mobile technologies used in the Moblin platform, the oFono infrastructure and the SyncEvolution plugin.

The GNOME usability team, represented by Calum Benson, reported on their experiments with GNOME 2.28 toolbars and whether labels would be better placed next to, instead of under, the toolbar icons. The team wants to work with Canonical to make life easier for newcomers as part of the Hundred Paper Cuts project to identify and remove 100 obstacles to usability.

The GNOME I18N team reported that GNOME 2.6 supports 48 languages and the documentation team that all newly produced work is under Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 3.0 licensing. Furthermore, the Bugsquad team reported fixing 12,549 bugs, and much more. The full Q2 report along with the previous annual reports are available at the foundation website.