Today (2nd August) has seen the launch of handshake.org – a decentralized certificate authority and peer-to-peer DNS service. As part of this, the organisation has pledged significant donations to free and open source projects.
The GNOME Foundation is pleased to be one of these recipients, receiving $300,000 for the GNOME Project and $100,000 for GIMP. Neil McGovern, Executive Director of the Foundation said “I am very grateful to handshake for this pledge. Ensuring that free software can be sustainably funded is a key challenge, and this donation helps fund further development. Further, GNOME cares deeply about privacy and the ability for all to communicate securely and looks forward to further development in the Handshake project”
“Firstly, this pledge serves as a long overdue thank you to the open source community both for the immeasurable contributions to the world, as well as making decentralized currencies and of course, Handshake possible in the very first place.
Secondly, the pledge ensures that any economic gain from this project will be directly beneficial to the open source community, while the distribution of the vast majority of the genesis block to the open source community ensures that they will have the incentive, whereabouts and deep influence in the long term governance of this protocol.” commented the Handshake Team.