The Gnome Foundation has hired Timothy Ney, the key organiser behind Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation and its managing director. Ney will become executive director of the Gnome Foundation, the organisation behind the GNU Network Object Model Environment that produced the Gnome user interface for Linux. The lead developer of the project is Miguel de Icaza of Ximian, a company based on building applications for the Gnome user interface. Ney has extensive experience working for non-profit organisations, including the New York Foundation for the Arts, where he was director of sponsorship and loan programmes. During his three years at the Free Software Foundation, he moved the organisation from deficit annual financing to assets totaling $1m. He has also served as executive director of Independent Feature Project. "Timothy's experience will help bring the Gnome Foundation to full maturity as a force in the free software community," said Havoc Pennington, chairman of the Gnome Foundation. "We're happy that Timothy has chosen to join our organisation. He has always been a great resource for Gnome," said de Icaza. Ney's organizing experience may be tested as de Icaza attempts to build an open source version of Microsoft's .Net architecture into Gnome. The move, called Project Mono, is attracting developer support and skepticism that Microsoft will tolerate an open source version of its development environment. Microsoft's .Net is due to debut by the end of the year and include the C Sharp programming language, .Net versions of Visual Basic and Visual C++ as well as a common language infrastructure that will give all three some Java-like characteristics. Skeptics of the move, including veteran Apache developer Brian Behlendorf, point out that open source developers do not know what patents underlie the .Net code and a project such as de Icaza's might face a demand that it negotiate a patent licence because it has duplicated patented code. De Icaza has dismissed such worries, saying the .Net platform brings programming advances to the developer community. Those advances can be implemented with existing technologies already in the public arena, he added. Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard have said they are adopting Gnome as their default Unix user interfaces. Gnome competes with a second desktop environment for Linux known as KDE. Ney has been working with Richard Stallman over the last three years to bring more attention to the free GNU programming tools, including the GNU C and C++ compilers used by many developers. Stallman initiated what is known as the free software movement while working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He sought to establish a library of free software on the Internet so programmers did not need to go to AT&T and pay for a license for Unix. AT&T had made Unix freely available to academic institutions before trying to commercialise the operating system. See the Operating Systems News Section for the latest headlines on Linux, Windows and other operating systems. Have your say instantly, and see what others have said. Click on the TalkBack button and go to the ZDNet news forum. Let the editors know what you think in the Mailroom. And read other letters.