GNOME's New Director Tackles Funding, Pride and Prejudice

Given the current political climate in the US and parts of Europe, it’s not surprising that the haters have been targeting one of open source’s most beloved projects.

While the Gnome Foundation’s newly minted executive director has been taking it slow and steady when it comes to getting the organization’s finances in order — much like the turtle in the great race of fable — he’s decidedly being more hare-like when it comes to setting the tone for social issues.

For the latter, he’s been operating on two fronts. He has both spoken out in support of people’s rights and has publicly put his foot down against haters.

If you don’t know, Gnome is one of the two most-used desktop environments in the Linux world. Steven Deobald was hired in early May to take over as the foundation’s executive director. The reins were handed to him by Richard Littauer, who had been acting as interim executive director since Holly Million ended her ten-month tenure on July 31, after abruptly resigning earlier that month.

While it doesn’t appear that Million left the company in dire straits, she did leave it with less income than it needs if it’s to continue without massively downsizing. This problem didn’t begin with her administration, however, as the project had already been dipping into surpluses it had accumulated for several years when she took the job. She had been hired with a mandate to get the organization’s fundraising on track, a goal she failed to accomplish..

Littauer’s turn at bat is one of the reasons why Deobald can afford to take a slower and more deliberate approach to fundraising, as Littauer and Gnome’s president Rob McQueen were able to secure enough additional funding from the Dalio Foundation to tide the organization over for a while.

In a report posted on Gnome’s website on Friday, Deobald said he has been making some initial, tentative fundraising steps with Rosanna Yuen, Gnome’s Senior Director of People — a position that includes administrative functions, HR, finances, and operations.

“Rosanna and I sat down to drill through a mountain of spreadsheets and formulate a simplified picture of the Foundation’s finances that rounds to the nearest $100 — napkin non-accounting that’s useful for visualization but not much else,” he wrote. “I’m really grateful for the time Rosanna spent with me; it gave me a much better picture of where we stand, month on month, year on year.”

His praise of Yuen isn’t surprising. Deobald is from Canada, a country where respect for others might be said to be a national characteristic. Born and raised in small-town Western Canada, he now lives in Halifax, the largest city and capital of Nova Scotia, which is one of the country’s eastern Maritime provinces.

“We need these cartoony visuals so we can start painting a fundraising picture for ourselves,” he added. “I’ve been told by many people ‘don’t make any promises!’ And I am not promising anything in particular. At this stage, we’re just sweeping the floor and sketching out our strategy.”

Pride in the Face of Prejudice

This year, Gnome got behind Pride Month even before the calendar page was turned to June, as Deobald noted on Friday’s report, “We’ve begun celebrating Pride Month a little early! You may see some colored flags on GNOME’s social media accounts and Jakub Steiner has produced some lovely Pride backgrounds,” he said, linking to graphic files here and here that Gnome supporters can download and use.

In another blog specifically dealing with Pride Month, Deobald pointed out that both open source and Pride Month support the notion of “inclusion”:

“Gnome is a weird project. It’s not a household name, like Linux. Nor is it a shrinkwrapped brand, like Red Hat, SUSE, or Ubuntu. But it is a massive, collective software project that includes many different components under its umbrella.

“What binds all these interconnected projects together if not a brand and not a singular BDFL technical vision? It is the founding principle and vision for the project: everyone should be allowed in. To use Gnome, to modify Gnome, and to collaborate on Gnome…

“Pride carries a very similar message: everyone is allowed in. Everyone should be allowed into a country or city or business. Everyone is allowed to be themselves.”

Unfortunately, not everyone in the open source community is on the inclusive bandwagon. This includes Bryan Lunduke, once a popular speaker at open source events and a journalist for Network World, but who these days strives to be the Tucker Carlson of Linux and open source. In a podcast posted on May 25 (to which we won’t link), he spent the entire fifteen-minute recording ridiculing Gnome for its stance. He attempted to argue that the purpose of Pride Month is to smoke out homophobes and transphobes for the purpose of ostracizing them.

Practicing Safety

I have no doubt that Lunduke would deny that he his practicing hate speech, but he is. I also have no doubt that he’s not concerned at all for the people that he claims are being hurt by gay and trans people trying to celebrate their right to be alive, but that his concerns are actually for the traffic and subscriptions they bring to his podcast.

I also think that if anyone were to listen to his words and be motivated to threaten, or to actually cause harm to gay and trans people — or people in any of the other groups being targeted — Lunduke would deny responsibility. It wouldn’t be his fault, he would claim. He didn’t tell them to threaten or hurt anybody.

Whether inspired by Lunduke or not, transphobes, homophobes, racists, and other haters are targeting people at Gnome and making threats against people connected to the project, leaving some folks scared and everyone concerned.

I discovered this on Wednesday, when I ran across a blog post by Deobald called On Safety, in which he addressed the issue:

“As you may be aware, the entire Gnome community has been on the receiving end of a coordinated harassment campaign for the past year. All Gnome users and contributors with a public profile, and those active on Matrix, are being harassed.

His accounts of this harassment are not detailed, and when I contacted him about this, he indicated that was intentional. He said it’s better not to provoke those behind the harassment. The purpose of his blog was solely to warn threatened members of the Gnome community to be careful, take these threats seriously, and not dismiss them as mere trolling.

“The harassment frequently takes the form of anti-LGBTQIA+ (most frequently anti-trans), racist, misogynist, anti-semitic, and anti-muslim messages,” he said. “Individual targets of the harassment have included Staff members, Board members, Foundation members, and users. Our community includes people living under oppressive, authoritarian regimes. It includes people in war zones. It includes refugees. These people are all acutely at risk.”

He indicated that the attacks have been stopped on Discourse, Gnome’s forum tool, and said that the project’s moderation team is working with the Matrix moderation team to at least reduce, if not eliminate the attacks on that platform.

“They are not simply ‘bullies,'” he wrote. “Their actions do not constitute ‘trolling.’ These are crimes.”

I’m pretty sure that Deobald didn’t use the term “crimes” frivolously. According to his LinkedIn résumé, he spent a little over a year working for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in his distant past. From personal experience, I know the RCMP doesn’t play around when it comes to crime.