"The GNOME Foundation has been slowly and quietly growing in marketing sophistication, arming itself to do battle with proprietary desktop leaders Microsoft and Apple. For instance, yesterday the foundation announced that it was raising its 2010 advisory board membership fees to $20,000 apiece for large companies and $10,000 for small ones.
"Those funds will not only help pay for the organization's well known "hack fests" -- where GNOME developers gather onsite to work on an open source project -- but also fund a small but growing staff of paid administrators. GNOME is becoming less of a volunteer labor of love and more like a business -- or at the very least, more like an organized non-profit.
"All of this is to help GNOME get its much anticipated 3.0 version built, stable and available, says the GNOME Foundation's executive director Stormy Peters."
