Like any project it needs to pay for its infrastructure and that comes from donations and sponsors.
The foundation also holds trademarks including the GNOME trademark that it is required to defend.
The foundation was setup to protect the project from legal issues, help fund the infrastructure,and build relationships that lead to fundraising and influence.
You might recall that GNOME had to defend its trademark at least once and was also hit with a patent troll.
Edited to add:
The money also goes to help fund GUADEC and hackfests where maintainers meet to work on goals. So there is more than just the executive director - there is a whole team that manages events, finances, and brand.
agreed. I was at my last job for 20 years. From here on in, I'll try to not stay so long in one place. But I stayed mostly because I was friends with everyone. I was paid well enough, but work was fun.
I'm the same age, and I was let go too. Corporate did a death by database search and got rid of a lot of people. I rather not speculate the reasons.. :)
a strange switch, xterm doesn't have transparency eitiher and as far as correctness goes, gnome-terminal is very correct compared to others. So I have no idea why you would switch to xterm.
No the difference is that GNOME is moving towards a 'product'. Everything is designed to work together, to be consistent everywhere. When you mix and match, you just get medicority because none of them were designed to work together at all. I would not call that even a Unix philosophy, it's just something that happened organically.
Doing what GNOME is doing is hard. Making hard choices on what to keep and what not. Fixing the things in the other parts of the stack instead of band aiding it in their own.
The foundation also holds trademarks including the GNOME trademark that it is required to defend.
The foundation was setup to protect the project from legal issues, help fund the infrastructure,and build relationships that lead to fundraising and influence.
You might recall that GNOME had to defend its trademark at least once and was also hit with a patent troll.
Edited to add: The money also goes to help fund GUADEC and hackfests where maintainers meet to work on goals. So there is more than just the executive director - there is a whole team that manages events, finances, and brand.