THE GNOME AND LINUX COMMUNITIES AND INDUSTRY LEADERS
JOIN TO CREATE THE GNOME FOUNDATION
~ Developers and Corporations Unite to Advance GNOME as the Leading Open Source Desktop Environment ~
LinuxWorld Expo, San Jose, CA -- August 15, 2000 --The GNOME project today announced the creation of the GNOME Foundation, which will be governed by a board of directors elected by the hundreds of volunteer developers who contribute to GNOME. In addition, industry leaders and organizations including Compaq, Eazel, Free Software Foundation, Gnumatic, Helix Code, Henzai, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Object Management Group, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, TurboLinux and VA Linux have announced their support for the foundation, with the goal of advancing the availability of this easy-to-use, open source, desktop environment.
"The GNOME Foundation marks a major step forward for the GNOME project," said Miguel de Icaza, founder of the GNOME project. "As GNOME continues to gain momentum, we needed a forum where the GNOME developers and corporate partners can come together to coordinate the continued development of GNOME. The support of these industry leaders will help us to achieve our dream of building a fully free, easy to use desktop environment that will be used by many millions of people."
The foundation will help set the technical direction of the GNOME project, promote the broad adoption of GNOME on Linux and Unix desktops and offer a forum for industry leaders to contribute to GNOME. The Bonobo component project, GTK toolkit development, Pango internationalization, GNOME Office integration and other projects will be embraced under the GNOME organization. The foundation will be modeled on the Apache Foundation, with a board of directors elected by the hundreds of volunteer GNOME developers.
GNOME Advisory Board
The GNOME project also announced the creation of an Advisory Board
which will allow corporations and other organizations to support GNOME.
Initial members of the Advisory Board include: Compaq, Eazel, Free Software
Foundation, Gnumatic, Hewlett-Packard, Helix Code, Henzai, IBM, Object
Management Group, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, TurboLinux and VA Linux.
About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation
The GNOME project has built a completely free and easy-to-use desktop
environment, as well as a powerful application framework for software developers
on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. The GNOME Foundation
will provide organizational, financial and legal support to the GNOME project,
and help determine its vision and roadmap. CollabNet, the leading
provider of collaborative software development services based on open source
principles, is helping to organize the GNOME Foundation. GNOME is
part of the GNU project, an effort to build a completely free Unix-like
operating system better known as GNU/Linux or Linux. Additional information
is available at www.gnome.org.
LINUX is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. Eazel is a trademark of Eazel,
Inc. All other names and trademarks are the property of their respective
owners.
Quote Sheet:
"It's always great to see companies coming together and working to bring open source technologies to the next level," said Brian Behlendorf, CTO & co-founder, CollabNet. "The creation of the Gnome Foundation will help move Linux beyond the operating system to becoming a viable desktop application and CollabNet is excited to be participating in this process."
"Compaq is pleased to join the Advisory Board of the GNOME Foundation,
continuing
Compaq's long-time support of the Linux community and open source,"
said Glenn Johnson, Director of Compaq's Linux Program Office. "Compaq
expects the foundation will be a valuable forum for us, other vendors,
and customers to contribute to the GNOME Project."
"Eazel is delighted to be a member of the Foundation and to be building software on the GNOME platform," said Mike Boich, CEO and co-founder of Eazel. "Much like the Apache Project before it, GNOME is benefiting from the interest of both developers and commercial entities. The GNOME Foundation can only help to accelerate that trend."
Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation said: "16 years ago, we began developing the GNU operating system, a replacement for the Unix operating system that would be entirely Free Software (free as in freedom). We aimed to give GNU the full scope of Unix, including compilers, editors, email software, even games. But beyond that, we hoped someday to give a GNU graphical interface like the Macintosh. Our third attempt at that, the one that succeeded, is GNOME, started in 1997 by Miguel de Icaza. GNOME, like all of GNU, is a project of the Free Software Movement, which has been working since 1984 to give software users the freedom to redistribute and change software. The rival Open Source Movement was founded in 1998 to avoid raising issues of freedom and principle as we try to do. Supporters of that movement contribute to work on GNOME, but GNOME is not part of that movement. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html for more explanation."
"Gnumatic Incorporated sees the Gnome Foundation as a major key to the creation of desktop and home user applications for Linux," said Dr. Linas Vepstas, CEO of Gnumatic Incorporated. "By providing a stable desktop development platform for Linux, applications such as GnuCash, the personal finance manager being developed by Gnumatic, will benefit from the broad array of standard Gnome technologies."
"We created Helix Code to deploy a free, modern and friendly desktop solution to the world," said Nat Friedman, CEO and co-founder of Helix Code. "Helix GNOME has brought a new level of accessibility and functionality to the hundreds of thousands of users who have installed our product. For GNOME, the next step is applications. Helix Code comes to the table with Evolution, a comprehensive communications and information management suite. Now, industry and developer support has rallied around the GNOME platform and major contributions are coming in from all sides. We will soon offer a total desktop solution that will reshape the industry. GNOME has arrived."
"HP is excited to join the GNOME foundation and will take an active role in working with the open source community to contribute to the future desktop standard for Linux and UNIX systems." said Martin Fink, R&D Lab Manager for UNIX Systems Enablement. "HP is migrating the HP-UX desktop to GNOME towards a goal of common look and feel between HP-UX and Linux."
"By partnering with industry leaders in the GNOME Foundation, IBM continues its strong commitment to open standards and a clear vision of Linux as the driving force for the evolution of e-business," said Daniel Frye, program director, IBM Linux Technology Center. "IBM believes this partnership will help enable innovation and will accelerate development of the Linux desktop."
"One of the challenges the Linux community is facing is how to integrate the new applications that are currently being developed with the established architectures that already exist in most business enterprises. GNOME developers have realized that building it around CORBA allows them to use components that integrate with other industry-recognized technologies, such as Java and C++. The OMG is well aware of the need for vendor-neutral organizations that allow developers to agree upon standard interfaces. We look forward to helping the GNOME Foundation in their mission, " said Dr. Richard Soley, CEO, Object Management Group.
"About three years ago, Red Hat created the Red Hat Advanced Development Labs (RHAD Labs) to support open source software on the desktop and became the first commercial company to make a contribution to GNOME development," said Bob Young, Chairman and co-founder of Red Hat. "With the formation of the GNOME Foundation, GNOME is truly coming of age in terms of market momentum. We are excited about the opportunities for GNOME and open source, and we look forward to working with the new members to the GNOME community, like Eazel, Helix, Sun Microsystems and others, as they bring applications and technology to the GNOME desktop environment."
"Sun is thrilled to be joining the GNOME Foundation and we plan to adopt GNOME as the future desktop for Solaris," said Marco Boerries, vice president and general manager of webtop and application software at Sun Microsystems, Inc. "We are committed to contributing significant engineering resources to the GNOME project and will work closely with the other GNOME members to ensure continued reliability and quality."
"TurboLinux is please to support the GNOME Foundation," said Rok Sosic, TurboLinux Chief Technology Officer. "We have used GNOME as our default desktop since 1999, and we've been very pleased with the progress that it has made toward becoming a full-featured standard. GNOME is one of the best examples of how open source software can succeed. Such wide ranging support from the industry is guaranteed to help the project achieve it's goals."
"VA Linux Systems has been proud to make GNOME available on our systems for years," said Dr. Larry M. Augustin, president and CEO of VA Linux Systems. "GNOME is representative of the kind of creativity and engineering that is available from the Open Source development community. We have a number of engineers who have worked on GNOME and GTK technology for some time, and are pleased to extend our GNOME efforts by joining the GNOME foundation."