GNOME Fellowship program announced to support "critical and under-resourced areas"

The people behind GNOME recently announced the GNOME Fellowship program, to provide financial backing to those working on specific areas.

What's it all for? As they said in the announcement, a lot of open source work depends on volunteers freely giving away their time to work on various things. This can result in some pretty critical open source tech being the result of a single person or only a couple of people. They're hoping to change this with the GNOME Fellowship program. All thanks to people donating via the GNOME Foundation.

The fellowships will generally last 12 months working in whatever areas they want, instead of being specifically directed towards something. Letting people who know their stuff just get on with it. For the first set of work though they're hoping to get people to work on the likes of "build systems, CI/CD infrastructure, testing frameworks, developer tooling, documentation, accessibility, and reducing technical debt".

With the announcement live they've begun accepting applications for people to be paid to work on open source, with the first cycle to begin in May 2026.

See more on the website and the announcement.