The executive director of the GNOME Foundation has quit after less than a year in the role.

The GNOME Foundation, the non-profit organization behind the GNOME desktop environment, has announced the departure of Holly Million, its executive director. We covered her appointment as recently as nine months ago, in October last year.

As we said then, the role is not a technical one: it is more that of a spokesperson, the public face of the project, and as the person who raises sponsorship for the GNOME Foundation, which is a tax-exempt US 501(c) organization.

At least early on, it looks like she was pretty good at this. Last November, the GNOME Foundation reported that it received a million euros ($1,089,750) from the German Sovereign Tech Fund, as the Fund explains.

Despite this, Robert McQueen's April 26 Update from the board said:

The next month, people were expressing concern at the level of spending, such as this Analysis of GNOME Foundation's public economy: concerns and thoughts from postmarketOS developer Pablo Correa Gomez:

The following week, GNOME developer Tobias Bernard reported on This Week In GNOME:

This was later followed by a much more upbeat update on the GNOME Development Initiative, which also pointed to the project's Five Year Plan. (The Reg FOSS desk is just about old enough that this sobriquet evokes unpleasant Stalinist associations, but then, this vulture is one of those graybeards of the FOSS world.) More recent TWIG updates are much more reassuring.

Although we do understand that the GNOME Foundation is a separate and independent entity and not under the control of Red Hat, as it should be - GNOME is used by lots of non-Red Hat projects - even so, GNOME is the default and only supported desktop environment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. As Register sister site The Next Platform reported at the start of the year, both IBM and Red Hat are doing quite well. It does seem to us as if the company could afford to spend a bit more to support a key part of its commercial offering.

As for Million, she is going back to university. In the Foundation's statement, she says: "I will be pursuing a PhD in Psychology and dedicating myself to my own private practice."

For now, she is working with interim executive director Richard Littauer, whose day-job is at Maintainer.io and who also works with the SustainOSS community and with CURIOSS, a community of Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) in universities and research institutions. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/07/17/gnome_boss_steps_down/