Google to become GNOME Sponsor

An article I just read by Ryan Paul over on Arstechnica reports that Google, along with Motorola will become sponsors of the GNOME desktop project and become members of the advisory board. As stated in Ryan’s article,

The current lineup of corporate members includes Canonical, Novell, Red Hat, IBM, HP, Intel, Imendio, ACCESS, and several others.

Also, another highlight from the article:

Google is a major investor in open source software and also sponsors the efforts of the Linux Foundation and other similar groups. Google has already funded a lot of GNOME development through its annual Summer of Code program and uses the GNOME desktop environment internally on Ubuntu workstations. In a statement issued today, Google’s Chris DiBona said that the search giant is “pleased to continue our collaboration with the GNOME Foundation through our membership on the Foundation’s Advisory Board.”

As well as:

Motorola uses the GNOME mobile technologies in its Linux-based MOTOMAGX platform which is LiMo-compatible and ships on a variety of handsets. “For mobile Linux, Motorola believes in open standards and open source technologies,” said Motorola software platforms vice president Christy Wyatt in a statement. “The Gnome Foundation allows us to expand our reach to the vibrant Gnome communities and be active in projects that we currently utilize from the Gnome stack, SQLite, gStreamer, and Bluez to name a few.”

This is awesome news for the GNOME project which has really taken off to become a “standard” in the Linux desktop race. That being said, I really hope that KDE can get back on track and get KDE 4.x.x into a workable state for everyday use again - it’s nice for Linux users to have a choice, but for me, GNOME has become my desktop. I’ve tried to go back to KDE several times after being a long-time KDE user, but I can’t live with the current [lack of] quality in the current releases.

Regardless of whatever goes on with KDE, GNOME is fast becoming the public face to Linux as most systems currently pre-installed with Linux (usually Ubuntu or Novell’s SLED) are running GNOME, most notably the current Dell line-up of Ubuntu powered Notebooks, Netbooks and Desktops.

Thank you Google and Motorola for stepping up and helping bring Free Software to the public!