Introductory Letter
Letter from the GNOME Foundation President.
Should be around 320 words. "In theory".
Article
2014 is on record as one of the most challenging years in the Foundation's history. It is also the year that has given us the most demonstrative and passionate display of support—from our members, our contributors, and the Free Software community—that we have ever experienced.
With two successful releases in 2014, both met with high praise from the technical press and our users, GNOME has had a very successful year as it continues to evolve the desktop and developer experience, maintaining its focus on quality and stability.
On the bleeding edge, GNOME has continued to deliver great releases every six months and garnered good reviews in the press. These releases included over 60,000 changes by more than a thousand contributors around the world.
On the business side, throughout the year we have seen successful adoption of GNOME 3 by enterprise-grade GNU/Linux distributions, with longer testing and support cycles. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 12, and Debian 8 now use GNOME 3 as their default desktop. Feedback continues to be positive and we are eager to hear from other organizations deploying GNOME 3 on a large scale to make their experience smoother.
At the beginning of 2014, we found ourselves on the verge of a lengthy legal battle to defend our trademark, at the same time as we were dealing with a temporarily restricted cash flow. Therefore, the GNOME Foundation's directors formulated a series of actions:
- Ran a successful media campaign to defend our trademark (more details on page $PAGE).
- Instigated a temporary spending freeze to stabilize our finances.
- Collected every single outstanding invoice from companies participating in the Outreach Program for Women (OPW).
- Worked with the OPW team to transition the program to the Software Freedom Conservancy, under the new name, "Outreachy". GNOME remains a strong partner of the new program, providing critical infrastructure.
These actions are representative of many challenges that required time, precision, and sustained work throughout the year. For each of these challenges and accomplishments, every member of the volunteer Board of Directors rose to the occasion, contributing far more of their time than has been typical of a GNOME Board.
The Board does not work in isolation however, and owes many thanks to the various teams - engagement, release, events & travel, translations, design, bug squad, sysadmin, documentation, and our many developers - for their continued involvement and support.
Preparing the Annual Report is a very time-consuming task. I would like to extend my thanks to everybody who has helped with this edition and whose names can be found on the next page. I have always enjoyed reading the GNOME Foundation's beautiful and well-written reports. Year after year, our volunteers take the time and effort to put together this substantial document for our membership and other interested parties, so it is a privilege for me to introduce this year's report, which I hope you will find just as interesting as I do.
After this momentous year, overcoming such hurdles, while still releasing great Free Software on schedule that exceeded expectations, I am looking forward to what the next year will bring!
Jean-François Fortin Tam
GNOME Foundation (director? president for 2014? the overlapping calendar vs fiscal vs election years are complicated 
Images
One of those, either as a small mugshot or bigger (ex: vertical) image around which the text flows? Up to the designers/layouteers…
http://jeff.ecchi.ca/public/P9294181-light.JPG (owned by Jeff, whatever license you need)
http://jeff.ecchi.ca/public/P9294104.JPG (owned by Jeff, whatever license you need)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jakubsteiner/14614731477/in/album-72157645680971008/
Version with neutral colors (taken from the original): http://jeff.ecchi.ca/public/DSCF1596-neutral-2000x1333.jpg
See Also
Editor/Reviewer Notes
Has been proofread by Sri, Rosanna, Karen & Nuritzi
Next Steps
Need to select image (one of the included). Need to add the page for Groupon article before printing. Proofreading complete and article ready for integration.