GTFO. They are saying that regular donations are so much better that they prefer them even if they will receive less money. Isn't that obvious? If you have $4k in the bank account today you can in theory hire a permanent dev but you don't know if you will be able to pay him next month. If you have $3k per month in regular donations you know that you will be able to pay someone as long as people don't cancel those. Which will take some time. Which gives you the stability needed to hire people.

Phrasing this as "gnome has too much money" is malicious.

Checks out, if you're a Gnome user you're already used to being told how you should be doing things by them.

I think a better title would be "Gnome is Asking You to Switch from Lump Sum Donations to Regular Donations, Even If the Total Amount is Smaller"

Do donations really come in all at 1 or 2 given dates per year?

I would assume non-recurring donors average out over the months. Maybe there is a bit more in holiday season.

But if I donate 200$ in May, are there no other people in the world that donate 200$ in June and then others still in July etc.?

edit:

I could not find any donation stats/charts for gnome. But assuming they are similar to KDE, it looks pretty managable to me. There seems to be a solid baseline of about 4k per month and then some months have huge extras. It does not seem very complicated to budget that.

2025: https://kde.org/community/donations/previousdonations/

2024 looks way more wild. But that is when they introduced the donation popup by the end of the year.

2024:

But I'm not...

Are they offering to pay me?

Or they could offer annual subscriptions?