"The GNOME Foundation had a temporary lack of reserves due to processing the funds for the Outreach Program for Women (OPW). Due to a very fast and generous response from the Free software community, the foundation now has over three months of operating costs, which is more than enough time for the pending invoices to be paid."
In plain English: They ran out of money because they used money which people had donated for software development to pay for the women's outreach program. Instead of waiting for the corporate downations to arrive, they prioritised the women's outreach program over everything else.
As for the GNOME charter, "The GNOME Foundation will work to further the goal of the GNOME project: to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is completely free software."
Nowhere does it say that the GNOME foundation is going into the business of diversity outreach. So why should people donating to the GNOME foundation, who expect the money to be spent on building the GNOME platform/desktop, instead see it goto an outreach program?
Running out of money would imply that there was, well, no money. Which was never the case. The Foundation has significant cash reserves, as you can easily verify from looking at its public accounts.
The outreach program has resulted in a significant increase in the number of developers working on the GNOME project, which improves their ability to build the GNOME platform. The charter doesn't say that they'll sponsor developer travel to conferences either, or the purchase of hardware in order to improve integration. Why are you hung up on a specific example of spending money in a way that improves the project, but not any others?
https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/CurrentBudgetFAQ
"The GNOME Foundation had a temporary lack of reserves due to processing the funds for the Outreach Program for Women (OPW). Due to a very fast and generous response from the Free software community, the foundation now has over three months of operating costs, which is more than enough time for the pending invoices to be paid."
In plain English: They ran out of money because they used money which people had donated for software development to pay for the women's outreach program. Instead of waiting for the corporate downations to arrive, they prioritised the women's outreach program over everything else.
As for the GNOME charter, "The GNOME Foundation will work to further the goal of the GNOME project: to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is completely free software."
Nowhere does it say that the GNOME foundation is going into the business of diversity outreach. So why should people donating to the GNOME foundation, who expect the money to be spent on building the GNOME platform/desktop, instead see it goto an outreach program?