Handshake.org donates $400,000 to GNOME Foundation, with 25 percent going to GIMP

The GNOME Foundation does a lot of important work, such as developing the best overall Linux desktop environment (GNOME 3) and countless useful apps. Quite frankly, without GNOME, the state of desktop Linux would probably be woeful. As a non-profit, the foundation depends on donations from both organizations and individuals. For example, back in May, we learned a mystery donor pledged a staggering $1 million to the GNOME Foundation. To this day, we still do not know the donor's identity. What we do know, however, is how some of the money will be used -- the hiring of four new employees.

There is yet another sizeable donation being announced by the GNOME Foundation, but this time, the donor is not a secret. Handshake.org, which describes itself as "a decentralized, permissionless naming protocol," has pledged $400,000, with $100,000 of it being earmarked for GIMP -- the essential image editor and manipulator. As a reminder, GIMP -- which stands for "GNU Image Manipulation Program" -- recently started to be hosted by GNOME on GitLab. Handshake will be donating to other open source projects too.

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"The GNOME Foundation is pleased to be one of these recipients, receiving $300,000 for the GNOME Project and $100,000 for GIMP. 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," says Neil McGovern, Executive Director of the foundation.

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The Handshake Team explains, "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."

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Fans of both open source and Linux should be very excited about this $400,000 donation, as when combined with the previous $1,000,000 given anonymously, there will likely be huge things from the GNOME Foundation over the coming months and years. Remember, while your favorite Linux distributions, desktop environments, and applications may be free of charge, there are real developers behind them that have to live and eat. If you feel inspired by these massive donations, and want to support the developers, you can give some money by clicking here. They even accept Bitcoin if you have some of that lying around.

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