GNOME head honcho Holly Million steps down

As nonprofit behind the desktop environment of the world's most profitable Linux distro maker scours around for cash

The executive director of the GNOME Foundation has quit after less than a year in the role.

The GNOME Foundation, the non-profit organization behind the GNOME desktop environment, has announced the departure of Holly Million, its exec director. We covered her appointment as recently as nine months ago, in late October.

As we said then, the job is not a technical one: It is more that of a spokesperson, the public face of the project, and as the person who raises sponsorship for work overseen and guided by the GNOME Foundation, which is a tax-exempt US 501(c) organization.

Her role would thus include doing things like lining up a million euros ($1,089,750) in funding for GNOME projects, as the German Sovereign Tech Fund awarded the community in early November. We assume the ball was rolling on that well before Million was appointed, though.

The foundation itself is in need of cash. Robert McQueen's update from the board in April this year read:

The GNOME Foundation has operated at a deficit (nonprofit speak for a loss – ie, spending more than we've been raising each year) for over three years, essentially running the foundation on reserves from some substantial donations received four to five years ago.

The next month, in May, people were expressing concern at the level of spending by the foundation. For example, postmarketOS developer Pablo Correa Gomez wrote:

With the numbers presented, the foundation had lost approximately $650,000 in [2021] ... and $300,000 in [2022]. And nobody seemed worry about it.

The following week, GNOME developer Tobias Bernard alluded to trouble within the foundation that could disrupt that much-needed funding from Germany for the community's projects:

We're currently facing a major issue from the GNOME Foundation side. We hope it will be resolved before it impacts the coordination of the [Sovereign Tech Fund] project, but if not, the future of parts of the project is uncertain.

Days later came an upbeat missive from Million about the foundation's GNOME Development Initiative, which also talked up the organization's Five Year Plan for itself and its orbiting projects.

(The Reg FOSS desk is just about old enough that this sobriquet evokes unpleasant Stalinist associations, but then, this vulture is one of those graybeards of the FOSS world.)

More recent updates from Bernard are much more reassuring.

Although we do understand that the GNOME Foundation is a separate and independent entity and not under the control of IBM-owned Red Hat, as it should be – GNOME is used by lots of non-Red Hat projects – even so, GNOME is the default and only supported desktop environment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. As El Reg's sister title The Next Platform reported at the start of the year, both IBM and Red Hat are doing quite well on paper. It does seem to us the IT giant could afford to spend a bit more to support a community providing a key part of its commercial offering.

As for Million, she is going back to university. In the foundation's statement, she says: "I will be pursuing a PhD in psychology and dedicating myself to my own private practice."

For now, she is working with interim executive director Richard Littauer, whose day-job is at Maintainer.io and who also works with the SustainOSS community and with CURIOSS, a community of Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) in universities and research institutions. ®

Editor's note: This article was updated after publication to clarify the foundation's funding timeline and situation.