[not_your_vase]

Why did they feel it necessary to have such a role? I mean Gnome is one of the oldest OSS projects, and has been functioning reasonably well in the past 20-some years without it (as a project at least, I mean. I don't want to go into DE-preferences). The post announcing the job opening doesn't make me smarter unfortunately.

[sramkrishna]

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.

[segphault]

This is not a new role, previous GNOME Foundation executive directors include Stormy Peters, Karen Sandler, and most recently Neil McGovern.

[ploum]

At the time, I interacted with both Stormy Peters and Karen Sandler during my GNOME time. Their work was really positive and really appreciated. During their time, their was no debate and everybody agreed that the money spent to pay them was money well spent.

(I don’t want to dismiss Neil McGovern but I simply have no experience working with him).

[caycep]

fundraising maybe? Usually those people are hired as rainmakers of some sort or another

[pluc]

That, and makes for a great low-impact scapegoat.

[civilitty]

Finally someone to blame for GTK4 and Gnome Shell!

[phkahler]

>> Finally someone to blame for GTK4 and Gnome Shell!

Having looked at moving from GTK3 to 4, I can understand the frustration. I also read a bunch of stuff and have concluded there are good reasons for the disruption, from making things more generic which allows new combinations of widgets (like images in menus) to allowing stuff to be in a different process. That does not mean the migration or support for doing it was handled well.

I was also disappointed to see they talked about having major releases at a regular cadence, which luckily they are way behind. Stability is a very important feature for toolkits and other infrastructure software. I would argue that being cross-platform and having stability are the 2 most important features of GTK and I hope it's a very long time before GTK5 comes along - if ever. The other major feature is the C API which allows it to have bindings to many languages.

[mananaysiempre]

I’d say that another major feature is that the maintainer of the toolkit is not interested in making sure the open-source version receives as narrow a use as possible. (The current maintainers of Gtk also did a fairly good job ensuring that, but at least it wasn’t an overt goal...) That ugh feeling from Qt, along with being forced to deal with C++ if I want to dive into the system, is the primary reason I haven’t switched to KDE, despite liking both their UX philosophy and their view of their place in the ecosystem[1] much more.

[1] https://youtu.be/IFGXVN9dZ8U (I don’t think there’s a text version, sorry)

[prokoudine]

That said, glad to see you working on the GTK4 port.

[ssivark]

Expanding on that question — is the “Executive Director” role a paid position, and how (much) is the new recruit being compensated?