Open source technology luminary Stormy Peters has been appointed executive director of the GNOME Foundation, effective immediately.

The entity behind one of the most popular desktop interface, GNOME Foundation is doing the right thing at the right time. The foundation has hired Stormy Peters as the executive director.

Last year, the GNOME Foundation began hosting summits for developers alongside another desktop environment community: KDE. "In our meeting with the KDE conference, we're trying to cooperate in our common goal of providing a free desktop," said Stormy Peters, executive director of the GNOME Foundation.

June 21, 2011: The GNOME Foundation today announced that it has appointed Karen Sandler as Executive Director. Sandler’s dedication to software freedom, her non-profits experience and her involvement in a wide range of free and open source software communities distinguish her as the logical choice for GNOME.

Stormy Peters recently became the executive director of the GNOME Foundation, where she is already working to raise public awareness of the GNOME desktop environment and user interface, and to attract new corporate sponsors and developers to the GNOME community.

The announcement by the GNOME Foundation that it is appointing Stormy Peters as its Executive Director confirms a suspicion that I've harboured for a while: that we are witnessing the evolution of major open source projects into new kinds of players in the computing world, ones that require full-time staff not just to run them, but also to articulate what exactly they are trying to do *beyond* the

GNOME Foundation executive director Stormy Peters discussed ways to bridge the gap between companies and open source software communities during a presentation at the Southern California Linux Expo.

The Pitfalls of Open Source Litigation ran a couple of days ago. It painted a picture of Open Source software as being a minefield of grumpy litigious geeks who want to cash in with fat lawsuits, and no clear guidance for how to stay out of trouble. Oddly, this all seemed to come from a most unlikely source, the director of the Gnome Foundation, Stormy Peters.

At the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), held in July in Portland, Oregon, a four-person panel moderated by Rob Lanphier of the Wikimedia Foundation weighed in on financial incentives in open source.