The GNOME Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the GNOME Project. The GNOME Project is a free software development effort, intended to create an open source platform for home, office, and appliance desktops.

The GNOME Foundation serves several important roles:

1. GNOME has grown to a point where we have hundreds of developers as well as a fair number of companies working together to improve GNOME. GNOME's previous, completely informal method for making decisions does not scale well to its current size. The GNOME Foundation will provide a forum where all of the members of the GNOME community can have a voice and help decide the direction that GNOME moves in.

2. GNOME needs a voice. The GNOME Foundation will be responsible for communicating information about GNOME to the media and corporations.

3. The GNOME Foundation will make GNOME more open. All of the important "political" decisions which used to be made behind the scenes by the top GNOME hackers will now be made in public by the GNOME Foundation. Technical decisions will still be made by package maintainers.

4. The GNOME Foundation is a legal entity that can accept donations and make purchases to benefit GNOME.

For now, there is no dedicated GNOME Foundation page, only the GNOME Project page.

The current draft of the charter is at http://www.decrem.com/gnomefdn.html. This is an informal document, which will guide the lawyers as they write the formal paperwork required for incorporation (such as the foundation bylaws).

Anyone who has contributed to the GNOME Project may become a member of the GNOME Foundation. The primary benefit of membership is the ability to vote for the Foundation's board of directors. If you have CVS access, become a member by adding your information to gnome-foundation/membership.txt in CVS. Otherwise, mail your full real name, your email address, and a sentence or so describing your contribution to GNOME to membership-committee@gnome.org, and they will add you. Contributions need not be code - documentation, webmastering, etc. are also considered GNOME contributions.

No. In the current draft of the charter, corporations are represented on an advisory board, which has no decision-making power. Individuals working for a corporation may be elected to the board of directors by a popular vote of the GNOME Foundation membership (i.e. GNOME developers and contributors). Also, the GNOME Foundation charter specifies that the board of directors cannot have a majority of individuals affiliated with any single company.

These companies wanted to see the Linux and UNIX desktop move forward decisively, so put their support behind GNOME.

Yes. The GNOME Foundation is simply a response to the increasingly difficult task of managing a project as large as the GNOME Project. It does not represent a significant change in technical direction or overall goals. It is not intended to be an attack on anyone else, simply a positive step for GNOME.

If you're a contributor or community member, you might mail foundation-list@gnome.org, where discussion of the foundation is ongoing. It's probably a good idea to read the current draft of the charter first, to avoid repeating issues we've already covered. If you're a member of the press, you might mail gnome-press-contact@gnome.org.

The advisory board is comprised of companies and organizations which want to further the progress of GNOME. This is a forum for them to communicate with each other and the GNOME Foundation membership. They have no power to make decisions about GNOME. We've invited the Debian Project and the Free Software Foundation to join the advisory board in addition to the companies who announced their support at LinuxWorld this year.

The board of directors is a group of GNOME contributors who are elected by the membership (i.e. every person who contributes to GNOME). This group oversees the GNOME Project and does its best to keep things running smoothly, making decisions that need to be made. Typical activities of the board might include approving the purchase of a new server, talking to companies about getting involved with GNOME, making sure we have a release roadmap and release coordinators, and so on.

The GNOME Foundation membership is comprised of everybody who contributes to the GNOME project. Thus, it it primarily comprised of volunteer GNOME contributors (even with all the corporate contributions to GNOME, volunteers still make up the majority of contributors - GNOME is a huge project). The membership's primary role (aside from participation in the GNOME Project) is to elect the board of directors.

Anybody who contributes to GNOME can become a member.

Send an email to membership-committee@gnome.org with your name, email address, and a description of how you have contributed to GNOME.

Any company or organization with an interest in GNOME can join the advisory board.

The advisory board is a forum where your company can discuss GNOME with other companies and key figures from the GNOME community. Joining the advisory board also allows you to show your support for the GNOME Project.

In the current charter (which is not yet official, because we have not yet legally incorporated the foundation), there is an annual fee of $10,000 to join the advisory board. This money is used to support the GNOME Project, by purchasing servers, attending conferences, etc. The companies that announced their participation at LinuxWorld were expressing their intent to join the foundation once it is formally incorporated. The primary benefit of joining the advisory board is the opportunity to discuss GNOME issues with the other companies on the board, and the opportunity to show your support for the GNOME Project.

If you're interested in discussing membership in the advisory board, mail Miguel de Icaza (miguel@helixcode.com) and he'll put you in touch with the interim steering committee we've established to handle Foundation details until formal incorporation is complete.