GNOME's Future Looks Bright For Once

Summary

Brodie Robertson shares his perspective on the recent changes in the GNOME Foundation, highlighting the appointment of Steven Deobald as the new executive director. Robertson, a long-time critic of the foundation, opens up about his concerns regarding leadership transparency and the foundation's financial issues. He notes the importance of strong, competitive desktop environments and credits Deobald with bringing optimism and transparency to the organization. The new leadership seems committed to addressing past issues and fortifying the foundation's operations, igniting hope for the future of GNOME.

Highlights

• GNOME finally has a new executive director, Steven Deobald, bringing fresh energy to the table. 🤩
• Robertson appreciates Deobald's focus on transparency and openness about financial matters. 💡
• Despite past turmoil, GNOME now seems committed to building a stable future under new leadership. 🚀
• Robertson finds Deobald's personal history with GNOME reassuring for the foundation's future. 👍
• The new leadership is open to feedback, a significant change welcomed by the community. 🗨️

Key Takeaways

• The GNOME Foundation has a new executive director, Steven Deobald, bringing fresh hope and excitement to the project. 🚀
• Long-time critic Brodie Robertson sees promising changes in leadership transparency and communication. 🌟
• The emphasis on financial stability and transparency is welcomed, addressing past overspending concerns. 💰
• Steven Deobald's long history with GNOME adds a personal touch to his leadership, reinforcing credibility. 🤓
• Openness to community feedback marks a positive shift in the foundation's approach. 🗣️

Overview

Brodie Robertson, a known critic of the GNOME Foundation, discusses the recent appointment of Steven Deobald as the foundation’s new executive director. Robertson has often voiced his dissatisfaction with GNOME’s previous leadership, primarily due to a lack of transparency and poor financial management. However, with Deobald’s appointment, Robertson expresses a renewed sense of optimism for GNOME's direction.

Robertson highlights that, despite the messy announcement, the transition to new leadership is already showing positives. Deobald, a long-time GNOME user, brings credibility and a user-first perspective, which Robertson values. His approach of open communication and addressing the tough issues – like financial transparency and user involvement – aligns well with community expectations, providing hope for substantive improvements.

What excites Robertson most is Deobald's focus on transparency and willingness to engage with the community directly. GNOME's user base now sees a potential shift towards greater openness, as evidenced by community outreach efforts. As Deobald intently engages in updating the foundation’s practices and finances, Robertson believes GNOME is on a promising path to a stable future.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to GNOME Foundation Criticism The narrator begins by explaining that they have a critical perspective on the GNOME Foundation, not due to malice towards the organization, desktop environment, or its developers, but out of a desire for improvement and proper representation. The criticism stems from a belief that GNOME users deserve a leadership that fully understands the project and the broader Linux ecosystem. Concerns are raised about the impact of banning major contributors to the project.
• 00:30 - 01:30: Importance of Strong Competition in Desktop Space The chapter discusses the significance of having robust competition in the desktop environment. It emphasizes financial transparency when issues arise, advocating for openness about the existence and origins of financial problems and the measures taken to prevent recurrence. The narrative indicates a lack of such transparency within the GNOME Foundation, stressing that irrespective of individual preferences toward GNOME, there is a collective interest in strengthening both GNOME and its foundation.
• 01:30 - 03:30: New Executive Director: Steven Deobald The chapter discusses the importance of having strong competition in the desktop space. It argues that rather than having a single dominant desktop, multiple major desktops should coexist, learn from each other, and improve collectively. This competition is beneficial for overall advancement and ensures that progress is continuous.
• 03:30 - 06:00: Holly Million's Tenure and Transition The chapter discusses the transition within the GNOME Foundation, highlighting the appointment of Steven Deobald as the new executive director. It notes the somewhat disorderly manner in which the announcement was first made via Stephen's personal blog before the official announcement by the GNOME Foundation.
• 06:00 - 09:00: Richard Litterer's Interim Tenure In the chapter titled 'Richard Litterer's Interim Tenure,' the focus is on Richard Littauer's departure as executive director. During his sign-off, Littauer announces that he will be succeeded by someone named Steven, whose last name is not mentioned, leaving his identity unknown to the public at that time. The announcement took place on May 2nd.
• 09:00 - 15:00: Steven Deobald's Background and Vision Holly Million stepped down from her role as executive director after less than a year, providing a public explanation in a post, though there might be more to the story.
• 15:00 - 20:00: Challenges and Goals for GNOME Foundation The chapter discusses the challenges and goals faced by the GNOME Foundation, specifically focusing on the controversial reception of a new executive director. The new director was previously a shaman and lacked a background or daily experience with Linux or GNOME, leading to criticism regarding her suitability for the role. This decision was perceived as unusual, raising questions about the foundation's leadership direction.
• 20:00 - 23:00: Positive Changes and Future Expectations The chapter discusses the unexpected changes in leadership within an organization. Initially, a person responsible for finances was replaced by Richard Litterer as the interim executive director, a role that was planned to be temporary but lasted longer than expected. Richard, who was a candidate for the executive director position the previous year, was well-acquainted with the organization and known to board members, making his appointment sensible.
• 23:00 - 25:00: Conclusion and Call to Engagement The chapter discusses a situation where an individual was initially unable to fulfill a request due to being busy. Despite this, Robert, known for his strong communication skills, successfully persuaded him to take on a part-time role. A condition for accepting the role was that efforts would be made to find a permanent executive director, with an initial agreement of a two-month contract. However, this temporary solution extended to ten months, and the contract was renewed for an additional month.

GNOME's Future Looks Bright For Once Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 If you've been watching this channel for any reasonable length of time, you would know I am quite critical of the GNOME Foundation. Not because I hate the organization, not because I hate the desktop, and not because I hate the people working on it, but because fans of GNOME deserve something better. They deserve a foundation where the leader of the foundation knows what GNOME is, knows what Linux is. When major developers get banned from the project,
• 00:30 - 01:00 that there is some explanation on why this happened. When there are financial issues, people are honest about these financial issues, and why they exist, how they came about, and how we stopped them from happening again. And frankly, this has not been the foundation that GNOME users have been given. And even if you're not a fan of GNOME, you should want a stronger GNOME and a stronger GNOME Foundation.
• 01:00 - 01:30 You should want strong competition in the desktop space, so you don't just have one desktop sitting around, kind of just like doing nothing. You should want a situation where major desktops can borrow from each other, major desktops can improve upon each other, and everything improves because of it. Strong competition is good for everyone, and it's not like things cannot improve.
• 01:30 - 02:00 So, now the GNOME Foundation has a new executive director, Steven Deobald. The announcement of this happening, look, frankly, was a bit of a mess. Now there is an announcement from the GNOME Foundation. GNOME Foundation welcomes Steven Deobald as executive director. This is not where the announcement was made, though. Technically, the announcement was made with Steven's blog post introducing himself
• 02:00 - 02:30 as the executive director, but technically it was a little bit earlier than that where Richard Littauer did his sign-off as the executive director and mentions the fact that someone known as Steven is going to be taking over the role. Didn't say his last name, no one knew who this Steven was at the time. This was... On the 2nd of May.
• 02:30 - 03:00 So, long before any of this actually happened. Just to recap how we got in this situation, after less than a year, around mid-last year, Holly Million stepped down from the role as executive director, in her words saying, That is the public explanation in this post. I would be very unsurprised to hear
• 03:00 - 03:30 if the negative reception of her being in the role was not also part of it. So, she practiced as a shaman, she seemed like someone who was coming in that had nothing to do with GNOME, didn't know really what GNOME was or what Linux was, wasn't like a daily Linux user. It seemed like a really weird choice to make. I don't care about the shaman stuff, but bringing someone in to be an executive director of a Linux-related foundation that is not like a Linux person?
• 03:30 - 04:00 I know she was there to deal with finances. It just... It just seems weird. She was then replaced by the interim executive director, Richard Litterer, and this position was supposed to be a lot shorter than it ended up being. So, he was contacted in mid-June, asking if he could come on and help as the interim executive director. He had applied for the position the year before, like, as the actual executive director, and he was familiar with the work, he knew some of the board members, and it made sense for him to do the role.
• 04:00 - 04:30 The problem is, uh, he couldn't do it because he was busy, and told Robert, no, uh, that's not gonna happen. But Robert is a very good communicator and somehow convinced him, on the condition that it would be a part-time position, and they would ramp up their efforts to find a permanent executive director as soon as possible, signing up for a two-month contract. That was ten months ago. He renewed the contract for another month,
• 04:30 - 05:00 and then two months, and then five months, working very limited hours, and helping where absolutely necessary. So effectively, since Holly stepped down, they haven't really had an executive director. They had someone in the role who was doing a bit of the work, but the work was being handed out to other people on the board, and there wasn't really anyone actually in that position. Didn't really have anyone steering the ship. So I'm very happy for Richard, who now doesn't have to deal with this, because he is still a very busy person. He's dealing with a PhD himself,
• 05:00 - 05:30 and he probably needs as much time as he can get for that, and just generally, you know, relaxing in the time that he has to relax in between doing his work. So now we have Steven Deobald. As Richard mentioned, I am receiving a baton from him after his tenure as Gnome Foundation's interim executive director. Richard helped guide the foundation through some rough terrain, and after all that, I'm especially grateful that Richard has been so generous with his time. All the best, Richard.
• 05:30 - 06:00 Thank you for everything you do. It always feels good to make a new friend like Richard, and I don't think he'll be a stranger to the Gnome community, even once he's neck deep in his PhD thesis. It is precisely that community, that global network of friends that has me so excited to work with the Gnome Foundation. The word excited doesn't do it justice. I have been involved in many free software, open design, open docs efforts over the years. All of these are links to various different projects you can go see over on GitHub. Feel free to dig around with that
• 06:00 - 06:30 if you would like to. But none of those have the gargantuan history, community, and installed base of Gnome. It is a privilege to serve Gnome, and I'm grateful. That gratitude is the entire reason I'm here, and I'd like to take the rest of this post to explain where that feeling comes from, and what I hope to do with it. Now, this line right here might make it seem like he has no idea about Gnome. He doesn't use Gnome. He's new to Gnome. This is not exactly true.
• 06:30 - 07:00 He might be new to the Gnome Foundation, but he's not new to the project. Steven has been using Gnome since 2002, and that might not sound like a big deal, but I do think it is important that the person running the Foundation actually uses the thing that they're running the Foundation of. I've criticized this with the Linux Foundation as well. I don't like the fact that
• 07:00 - 07:30 people don't use the Linux desktop in the Linux Foundation. I don't like the fact that you have to use proprietary software in the open source initiative. Like, these are things which is like fundamentally against the core values of what you're doing. I grew up in a village of a thousand people in Western Canada, and within that village, I was unquestionably that computer nerd kid. I built a graphical mud before the term MMORPG was coined.
• 07:30 - 08:00 The code was awful. I started my first web development company when I was 15 years old. It was very 1996. Now, after university, his professional career can be broken down into two 10-year chunks, pre-crash and post-crash. The first 10 years is a blur. I joined ThoughtWorks when they had fewer than 500 employees, got involved in the early agile software movements, used Rails before 1.0, wrote C Sharp, Ruby, Java, JavaScript, and Clojure Code, joined a DRW, built large distributed systems, led teams,
• 08:00 - 08:30 got bored, moved to India, and started Nilenso Software with seven friends. Nilenso Software is India's first employee-owned technology cooperative, and it still exists today. Two years after that, though, he had a bicycle crash and three botched eye surgeries while visiting a clinic in California, and was left partially blind. Finding it difficult to code or even use a computer at all at certain contrasts, white backgrounds, for example, still caused me instant headaches. So he moved into sales,
• 08:30 - 09:00 recruiting, management, startups, fundraising, and product consulting. After leaving Nylenso, I volunteered with non-profits and worked on two open-source database products, XTDB and Endatabase. After closing down Endatabase, I began interviewing with the Gnome Foundation, which brings me here. Over the past three decades, I've been inspired by many open-source projects, but the aspect of Gnome that inspires me the most is the clarity of its mission. There is never any disagreement about the mission. Gnome is a universal
• 09:00 - 09:30 computing environment. It is for everyone, everywhere. I wouldn't necessarily agree that is the mission of Gnome. Gnome is a very opinionated desktop that has very specific design goals, design language, and it is intentionally not for everyone. There are certain use cases Gnome does not want to address. There are certain things that Gnome does not consider to be important
• 09:30 - 10:00 to a desktop experience. But I do agree that they are clear on what their mission is. As I said, he's been using Gnome since 2002, and by the late 2000s, it was becoming very easy to take Gnome for granted. By Gnome 3, it's safe to say I did take Gnome for granted. This is a good thing in a way. We take the water utility or electricity in our homes for granted precisely because they work so perfectly and invisibly that their origins can be forgotten. But Gnome isn't financed
• 10:00 - 10:30 by billions of tax dollars. It's easy to forget that too. My friends and colleagues over the years have compared Gnome to MacOS and Windows apples to apples as if Gnome were also built by a $3 trillion corporation. If your open source project is compared favorably to competitors with a $6 trillion aggregate market cap, you're doing something right. Now, this is the real big one for me. This makes or breaks whether or not this is going to be a change in Gnome or a repeat
• 10:30 - 11:00 of the last multiple years. Transparency. Bringing that feeling to users means showing them the people and processes behind Gnome. None of us can understand infrastructure like Gnome without a window into it. So many of the systems we rely on every day are hidden from us. Even in my few short days with the Foundation, I've seen everyone working hard behind the scenes to keep the lights on and ensure Gnome 49 will be a success even if it feels like Gnome 48 was just released moments ago. I want millions
• 11:00 - 11:30 of Gnome users to see what I've had the privilege to see, the life and energy are the folks who keep Gnome running for us. We should celebrate. We have every reason too. Transparency isn't a switch we can just turn on. It's a constant effort we apply to our own processes. It's iterative, it's work, but it can also be fun. Knowing that everyone else is trying their hardest can be the most energizing motivation and I'm excited to help. Beyond transparency, I hope we can re-establish the Gnome foundations, well, foundations. The foundation exists to support Gnome,
• 11:30 - 12:00 to support design and development and to support contributors. A big part of this is financial stability. Yes, this is such a major problem. The Gnome foundation has been massively overspending and it's finally come back to hit them. They've had to make massive cuts to travel expenses, a bunch of other cuts. This goes into the transparency thing as well. If people don't feel like the foundation is transparent, if they don't feel like
• 12:00 - 12:30 the foundation is actually doing things they want it to do, that issue is going to get worse and I'm so happy we have a new executive director who the first thing they're saying is, yeah, this is actually a big deal and we need to sort this out. Ultimately, the foundation should support new growth, but to begin with, we need bedrock. Absolutely. You cannot expand,
• 12:30 - 13:00 you cannot do new things if you don't have that foundation that is not going to suddenly collapse every single year. One word to describe these intentions is resilience across finances, people, documentation, and processes. Let's build an environment that lasts another 27 years. Yes, we are a few short days in. I don't know what's going to happen in six months, 12 months, two years from now, but even so far, we are seeing very small
• 13:00 - 13:30 but good steps in the right direction. This is crazy. I got an email from somebody at the Gnome Foundation in an official capacity about Steven taking on this role and asking if I had any questions for Steven. That might not sound crazy, but it's felt like this entire time, the Gnome Foundation just didn't care that people had this negative perception of them, didn't try to reach out to anyone with any concerns they had,
• 13:30 - 14:00 didn't try to ask if maybe you wanted some questions, nothing. Like, just pretended like everyone talking about Gnome just didn't exist. Just this by itself is such a good change. Also, crazy, this is insane, but 2025-05-09 Foundation Report by Steven Deobald. An explanation of what
• 14:00 - 14:30 the Foundation is doing. What he's been doing over the past week, what's going on the Foundation, things that he wants to do going forward, just the most basic of basic explanations of what the Foundation is doing and why the Foundation exists. Again, this is not crazy, this is not some innovative new idea, but just this goes so, so far to actually being transparent. I have
• 14:30 - 15:00 hopes for Steven and I have hopes for the Gnome Foundation. It seems like with Steven at the helm, there is actually some interest in addressing issues. Now, are they going to get addressed? I don't know. This is just one Foundation report, this is just one email, but it's a start and it's better than nothing. It is so much better than things were going before. And I'm not blaming Richard, he was doing things part-time,
• 15:00 - 15:30 he didn't have time for it, but the fact that it had been happening for so, so long. I've already reached out to Steven to see if he wants to come do the podcast, he said he wants to go and achieve something at the Foundation before he actually does so, which is totally understandable, but I absolutely would like to speak to him and see just why he took up the role and what he thinks he can do at the Foundation. So, the Gnome Foundation has been in a tough state for a long time and I want
• 15:30 - 16:00 things to change. And let me know your thoughts down below. If you're a Gnome Foundation member, if you, you know, think something's actually going to happen here, if you think nothing's going to happen here, I would love to know. So, if you like the video, go like the video. If you really like the video and you want to become one of these amazing people over here, check out the Patreon, Subscribstar, linked in the description down below. That's going to be it for me and do you actually have hope?