2023–2024 Annual Report

Table of Contents

• Letter From the President
• About GNOME
• Project Highlights
• Sovereign Tech Fund
• Endless Grant
• Infrastructure
• Events
• Outreach
• Advisory Board
• Finances
• Friends & Partnerships

Letter From the President

As GNOME Foundation President, it is my pleasure to present this report on the GNOME Foundation’s 2023-2024 financial year, covering the period from October 1st 2023 to September 30th 2024. I hope that you enjoy reading about the many exciting initiatives and developments our organization undertook over the year, as part of our mission to build a world where everyone is empowered by technology they can trust.

2023-2024 was an significant year for funding for the GNOME Foundation, with two major sources of income providing the basis for a huge amount of activity over the year. The first of these came in the form of development funding from the German government’s Sovereign Tech Fund, which provided in excess of one million dollars which was put to use in an ambitious development program. The second was a grant from Endless which provided $250,000, with funding to support Flathub and enable development work on parental controls features.

The GNOME Foundation’s highly successful events program continued with its regular schedule over 2023-2024, with exciting editions of GUADEC, GNOME.Asia and Linux App Summit. Several of these events were notable, with GUADEC having its first ever event in the United States, and Linux App Summit having its first event in central America.

In addition to these notable events over the year, the Foundation continued to provide its regular and vital support for the GNOME project, providing world-class development infrastructure for the project, as well as a meeting place for important project stakeholders. Our ongoing outreach efforts also performed well over the year, as did our support for app developers through the excellent Circle initiative. The GNOME Project itself had a bright 2023-2024, with two fantastic GNOME releases.

While it contained many successes, the 2023-2024 year also brought a number of challenges, as is reflected in the finance report section of this report. The departure of Executive Director Holly Million in July 2024 was an unfortunate setback. Fortunately, the Board of Directors was able to secure an interim Executive Director to immediately fill the role, and we were thrilled to be able to welcome Richard Littauer to lead the organization.

Allan Day

– 15 December 2025

About the GNOME Foundation

The GNOME Foundation is the official non-profit organization of the GNOME project. With a mission to create an elegant, efficient, and user-friendly computing platform composed entirely of free software, the Foundation plays a pivotal role in shaping the future of open source software.

The Foundation supports the project through these core activities:

Official Voice and Communication: Serving as the official voice and legal entity of GNOME, the Foundation facilitates and assists communication between the project and its stakeholders. It establishes effective channels to engage with the community, media outlets, and both commercial and noncommercial organizations interested in GNOME software. By fostering transparent and inclusive dialogue, the Foundation ensures that the project remains responsive to user feedback and community needs.

Development Funding: The Foundation facilitates the receipt and dispersal of grants and contracts for otherwise-unfunded development activities, based on the needs of the project.

Infrastructure: To facilitate the technical development of the GNOME project, the Foundation provides essential infrastructure services, such as GitLab, continuous integration, forum services, chat software, email services, webservers, and the Nextcloud office suite. These resources enable developers and contributors to collaborate seamlessly, fostering a vibrant and inclusive community that thrives on innovation and teamwork.

Events: The GNOME Foundation actively coordinates and manages GNOME’s conferences, including GUADEC, GNOME.Asia, and Linux App Summit. These events serve as crucial platforms for knowledge exchange, networking, and community building. Additionally, the Foundation represents GNOME at relevant conferences organized by other entities, promoting the project’s values, achievements, and ongoing development efforts.

Outreach: In an effort to increase the diversity of our industry, and of contributors to free and open source software in particular, the Foundation provides financial support and services for outreach programs such as Outreachy and Google Summer of Code.

2023-2024 Project Highlights

The GNOME project had an incredibly successful 12 months over the 2023–2024 financial year, including exciting releases, major technical developments, and emerging community initiatives.

Releases

The GNOME Project produced two incredible releases in 2023–2024: GNOME 46 in March 2024, and GNOME 47 in September 2024. Codenamed "Kathmandu" and "Denver", these two releases contained an incredible number of new features and enhancements, and continued GNOME's tradition of strong time-based releases.

Major new features in these two releases included:

• Search everywhere: an easy way to search across all locations in the Files app
• OneDrive support in GNOME Online Accounts: allowing Microsoft OneDrive to be seamlessly accessed from the GNOME desktop
• Remote login with RDP: enabling GNOME desktops to be used in a dedicated remote mode using the widely supported RDP standard
• Enhanced accessibility: including modernized assistive technologies, enhanced keyboard navigation, and new speech synthesis features.
• Accent colors: a highly requested feature allowing users to personalize colors on the desktop
• Upgraded screen recording: using hardware encoding to increase performance
• Re-architected save and open dialogs: providing a consistent experience with the Files app and a vastly more capable featureset
• Upgraded Calendar app: GNOME's calendar had two impressive releases, which included reworked events popovers and a huge number of other improvements

New features were only part of the story for GNOME 46 and 47. Other enhancements were found through GNOME's core technologies, improving screen rendering quality, performance, security, and overall user experience.

GNOME's development technologies also saw significant enhancements during the 2023-2024 financial year, including:

• A new default renderer in GTK
• CSS engine enhancements
• Graphics offloading for improved media performance
• New UI widgets in Libadwaita
• Accessibility improvements in GTK

For more details, see the GNOME 46 and GNOME 47 release notes.

GNOME Circle

Circle is the GNOME Foundation's highly successful support program for developers who are using the GNOME platform to create innovative new apps. During the 2023-2024 financial year a total of 13 new members apps joined the program, including:

• Errands, a simple todo list
• Letterpress, which converts images to ASCII art
• Switcheroo, a simple tool to convert image file types
• Decibels, a simple audio player for individual files
• Fretboard, a guitar chord practice app
• Graphs, for plotting and manipulating data easily
• Railway, a one-stop shop to look up travel information across networks and borders
• Binary, a tool for converting numbers between bases
• Biblioteca, for reading GNOME's documentation offline
• Hieroglyphic, an intelligent search tool for finding LaTeX symbols by roughly sketching them from memory
• Resources, a beautiful and powerful system monitor tool for observing processes, CPU, RAM, GPU, disk, network, and battery
• Tuba, a social media client for federated networks like Mastodon, GoToSocial, and Akkoma
• Valuta, a quick currency conversion tool

GNOME Bug Bounty Program

In August 2024 the GNOME Project was thrilled to launch the GNOME Bug Bounty Program. Using the YesWeHack platform, this initiative tracks and offers payment for the resolution of security issues in key GNOME components (currently GLib, glib-networking, and libsoup). We are extremely grateful to the Sovereign Tech Agency’s Sovereign Tech Resilience program for funding this important effort.

Sovereign Tech Fund

The Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), operated by the Sovereign Tech Agency (STA), provides financial support to critical software in the public interest, such as GNOME. In November 2023 STF agreed to investment in GNOME with funds valued at 1 million Euros. This funding provided much-needed support for accessibility, GNOME’s core platform, QA and developer tools, security, hardware support, and design.

Special thanks go to Sonny Piers and Tobias Bernard for their work in securing this funding, and for managing the development team.

The GNOME Foundation provided the required legal, finance and accounting services for this important initiative. The following is a very brief summary of the technical achievements of this program:

Accessibility

• Development of Newton, a prototype replacement for the existing AT-SPI accessibility API
• Significant modernization of Orca, GNOME’s screen reader
• Integration of accessibility features into WebKitGTK and Flatpak
• Development work on Spiel, a modern speech framework for the Free Desktop

Platform

• Ongoing development of Libadwaita alongside new features including :bottom sheets, adaptive dialogs, multi-layout views, wrap boxes, toggle groups, and work on GTK CSS
• Improvements to GNOME’s notifications UI and APIs
• Work on a global shortcuts portal, to allow apps to request the ability to set system-wide keyboard shortcuts
• Various work around XDG Desktop Portals, including a new documentation site, a new portal for USB devices, and improvements to a number of pre-existing portals
• Flatpak maintainance work, MIME file and icon renaming in flatpak-builder,
• A new, more capable, GNOME file chooser, based on the Files app

QA, Developer Tools, and GNOME OS

• Replacement of ostree with systemd-sysext in GNOME OS
• Creation of sysext-utils, a new tool to build custom versions of components, that can be applied to a immutable system
• Upgrading of the GNOME Flatpak runtime’s CVE scanning features
• Creation of a new installer for GNOME OS
• Improvements to GNOME OpenQA testing platform

Security

• Desktop integration for systemd-homed
• GNOME Keyring cleanup and modernization
• Expansion of the Key Rack app’s featureset
• Development of Glycin, a more secure replacement for GdkPixbuf

Hardware Support

• Improved touch gestures in Mutter
• Hardware encoding of screencasts
• Completion of variable refresh rate support in Mutter
• Performance improvements in GNOME Shell

More details about all this work can be found in Tobias Bernard’s GNOME STF report.

Many thanks to the following contributors whose work was instrumental in delivering this program: Matt Campbell, Joanmarie Diggs, Georges Stavracas, Eitan Isaacson, Andy Holmes, Alice Mikhaylenko, Julian Sparber, Hubert Figuiere, Dorota Czaplejewicz, Philip Withnall, Evan Welsh, Pascal Garber, António Fernandes, Tom Coldrick, Jerry Wu, Adrien Plazas, Neill Whillans, Sam Hewitt, Adrian Vovk, Sophie Herold, Neill Whillans, Martín Abente Lahaye, Felix Häcker, Dhanuka Warusadura, Jonas Dreßler, Dor Askayo, Ivan Molodetskikh, and Tobias Bernard.

Endless Grant

The GNOME Foundation was delighted to receive a two-year funding grant from Endless which began in December 2023. This grant included restricted funding to be targeted at key development areas, as well as an element of unrestricted general funding for the Foundation. The main areas of restricted funding were: 1) development funding for GNOME, in the areas of GNOME Software, GLib, and parental controls, and 2) Flathub support and development, including technical, legal and financial support.

Parental controls & digital wellbeing

Philip Withnall was contracted by the GNOME Foundation from March 2024 in order to deliver the first program area of the Endless grant, with a particular focus on parental controls. The first six months of this work was spent putting basic digital wellbeing features in place, which could then be used in later stages of the project as the basis of parental controls. These digital wellbeing features included break reminders and the underlying functionality for tracking and presenting a user’s “screen time”.

Flathub

Bartłomiej Piotrowski’s ongoing Flathub sysops work was funded from the Endless grant over the 2023–2024 financial year. During this period, Flathub experienced explosive growth, reaching a number of significant milestones in August 2024, including:

• 70% of top apps verified
• 100+ curated quality apps
• 4 million active users
• 2 billion app downloads

More details can be found in Bartłomiej’s update post.

Infrastructure

The GNOME Foundation’s infrastructure team had a highly successful year in 2023–2024. A highlight was a major migration of GNOME’s development infrastructure to AWS. This migration was possible due to a generous donation of a large amount of cloud infrastructure to the GNOME Foundation. The migration to AWS was a massive effort undertaken by the Foundation’s small but dedicated, and highly-skilled, team of site reliability engineers. The needs of the project were documented in 2020 and the migration took place in June and July 2024.

Congratulations to Bartłomiej Piotrowski and Andrea Veri for completing this giant task and thank you to AWS for your support!

Events

The GNOME Foundation’s events program delivered a successful string of conferences during the 2023–2024 financial year. These included the first GUADEC in the USA, a Linux App Summit in Mexico, and a highly successful GNOME.Asia in Nepal.

GUADEC 2024, Denver, USA

GUADEC is the primary annual conference for the GNOME community. In 2024 it was held in Denver, USA. This was the first GUADEC to ever be held in the United States, and the second GUADEC to be held outside of Europe (the first being GUADEC 2022 in Mexico).

Holding GUADEC in the USA presented new challenges for the Foundation’s conference team. Nevertheless, the conference ran incredibly smoothly, and the location provided opportunities for contributors and stakeholders to attend who would not have otherwise been able to. In total 70–80 people attended in-person and more than 200 joined remotely.

GNOME.Asia 2023, Kathmandu, Nepal

GNOME.Asia is the GNOME Foundation’s annual Asia summit, which has been successfully running since 2008. The 2023 edition of GNOME.Asia was held in Kathmandu, Nepal, at Softwarica College of IT and E-Commerce. Approximately 100 people attended in-person, with around another 150 participating remotely.

Linux App Summit 2024, Monterrey, Mexico

Linux App Summit (LAS) is an annual event which brings together a global community of technologists with a focus on the Linux app ecosystems. The event is jointly funded and organized by the GNOME Foundation and KDE eV.

Linux App Summit 2024 was held in Monterrey, Mexico. The conference was executed flawlessly and even online attendees had a seamless experience where they could participate via Matrix and Telegram throughout the talks, including Q&A periods. Around 30 people attended in-person attendees and around 60 watching online.

Outreach

The GNOME Foundation’s well-established outreach program provides opportunities for those from under-represented demographics to gain experience as open source contributors. These efforts primarily take place through our participation in partner internship programs.

Outreachy

The GNOME Foundation facilitated funding for a total of four Outreachy internships during the 2023–2024 financial year. This funding was generously provided by Endless and enabled the four interns to gain valuable experience in two internship projects: implementing end to end tests for GNOME OS using OpenQA, and user research on the Files and media apps.

Google Summer of Code

GNOME has a long history of participating in the Google Summer of Code program. In 2024 we were thrilled to be able to support a total of eight internships, which were coordinated with the expert help of our Internship Committee. The internships spanned a range of technical projects, including porting code to Rust, user interface work in the Papers app, and a new development tool for the Tracker search engine and database.

Many thanks to all the mentors from the GNOME community who made these internships possible.

Advisory Board

The GNOME Advisory Board is made up of organizations and companies that support GNOME and have an interest in the future of the project. While the Advisory Board does not have decision-making authority for the GNOME Foundation, its members communicate with the Board of Directors and help our directors guide the overall direction of GNOME and the GNOME Foundation. The Advisory Board meets twice a year, in the summer and the winter. The aim of these meetings is to:

• Understand the Advisory Board’s needs, and express them to the community
• Express the community’s needs to the Advisory Board
• Get feedback from the Advisory Board on our plans
• Provide a space for Advisory Board members to discuss their GNOME-related work with one another

The 2023–2024 Advisory Board included Canonical, Debian, The Document Foundation, Endless, Google, Red Hat, Sugar Labs, and SUSE.

We are always looking for new organizations that have a stake in the future of GNOME development and are interested in participating in the Advisory Board. If you would like to join, please contact info@gnome.org.

Finances

The following “at-a-glance” report shows an overview of the GNOME Foundation’s finances over the 2023–2024 financial year, alongside the equivalent figures for 2022–2023.

As can be seen in the table below, 2023–2024 differed significantly from the previous financial year, with a far larger quantity of capital flowing through the Foundation. The main reason for this was income of in excess of $1,000,000 from the Sovereign Tech Fund, the vast majority of which was spent within the financial year on development contracts. (This income and expenditure related to STF is captured in the support and infrastructure expenditure category.) Other major sources of income in 2023–2024 included $250,000 in grant funding from the Endless Foundation, and approximately $100,000 in Advisory Board fees.

Notable expenditure in 2023–2024 included high conference expenses, largely due to the location of GUADEC 2024 in Denver, USA, which was relatively expensive compared to other historical GUADEC locations. Additionally, relatively high outreach costs were due to a larger amount of staff time being devoted to this area in 2023–2024.

The 2023–2024 financial year saw the GNOME Foundation incur a total loss of almost $250,000. However, it should be noted that this report does not differentiate between restricted and unrestricted funds. A significant proportion of the income in 2023–2024 was restricted, including $200,000 of grant funding from Endless and $72,000 in income for the GIMP project. As a result, the overall loss of unrestricted funds over 2023–2024 was greater than the total combined loss indicated below. These losses were not forecast as part of the 2023–2024 budget, and can be primarily attributed to fundraising not proceeding as planned during the financial year.

The GNOME Foundation operates a reserves policy in order to ensure that the organization has sufficient funding to continue operating in the event of severe financial disruption. A small part of this mandated reserve was used towards the end of the financial year, in the order of $19,000. This required the following 2024–2025 budget to plan for a small surplus in order to replenish the Foundation’s reserve.

More details about the Foundation’s finances during the 2023–2024 financial year can be found in our financial reports.

Friends & Partnerships

We are extremely grateful to every one of our donors. We know that for many of our individual supporters, it is with significant difficulty that you regularly contribute to the GNOME Foundation in support of GNOME and its mission. We do not take your generosity for granted.

There is a massive change taking place globally right now and GNOME is perfectly positioned to help enable that change. Governments are recognizing the need for digital sovereignty, corporations see the risk in tying themselves to proprietary platforms, schools want to provide open source tools that their students can not only benefit from but also learn to build on top of, and the world’s citizens are finding that closed-source and proprietary software tools repeatedly fail at privacy, equity, inclusion, and justice. Everyone deserves a computing environment they truly own and that they have the right to repair and improve.

In recent years, more and more partners have emerged, working beside us to build this equitable future. Hardware vendors, web service companies, other non-profits, other Free Software projects, government programs, public infrastructure funds, and millions of volunteers are all working toward this future with us.

We intend to embrace every partner across the globe who shares this vision of universal and trustworthy computing with us. We will be stronger together.