GNOME is the only open source desktop project to take a stand for ease of use and UI consistency over feature creep and hyper-configurability. Our Human Interface Guidelines, developed by a team of GNOME volunteers and UI professionals, and released before GNOME 2.0, are the most complete Free Software usability guidelines in existence. Every application in the GNOME Desktop release has benefited from this focus on consistency and usability. We believe that this focus will produce a user environment that "just works" and as a result lets GNOME users -both experienced and inexperienced- focus on doing real work instead of struggling to learn new applications.

Beyond making GNOME easier to use for the average computer user, GNOME has also taken the lead in making the Unix desktop accessible to those with disabilities. In GNOME 2.4, the accessibility framework that debuted in GNOME 2.0 has been joined by award-winning accessibility tools like the GNOME Onscreen Keyboard (gok) and Gnopernicus, which allows for the use of braille readers, voice synthesizers, and pointing devices. Many governments, including the US government, require comprehensive accessibility support in software they purchase. After dozens of person-years of effort, GNOME is the only free software desktop to address this issue.

The key libraries in the GNOME Development Platform carry guarantees of API and ABI stability. This means that 'porting' an application from GNOME 2.0 to GNOME 2.4 involves exactly nothing, if a developer does not wish to take advantage of new functionality in the libraries.

Popular and robust Free Software applications such as Mozilla, Eclipse, Evolution, Gnumeric, Abiword, Gaim, X-Chat, and more are based on GNOME or GTK+. These applications are among the most powerful and capable in the Free Software world, and we expect that they'll only get better as they take more advantage of the GNOME development environment. In addition, other important desktop projects, like Mono, Java, and OpenOffice.org, are working on integrating with GNOME and GTK+.

GNOME 2.4 is the second 'time-based' GNOME release. Because GNOME releases on a regular schedule, contributors know that their contributions will be in a stable release and on the desktops of users everywhere within a short, predictable period after they contribute. In addition, people who want to deploy GNOME know that they can count on regular releases when they are planning rollouts or integration with their own products.

Additionally, the GNOME Foundation allows companies to support GNOME, while at the same time ensuring the independence of the board by ensuring that they are selected by the developers who work on GNOME. This infrastructure helps organize releases, sponsors the annual GUADEC conference, and the board hopes to extend that support to regular North American summits as well.

All GNOME platform libraries are licensed under the LGPL or similar license, so developing for the GNOME platform is 100% free of license fees, for developers of both Free and proprietary software.

GNOME is here to stay. Besides the active GNOME community (which has now supported and developed GNOME for over five years), many of the biggest supporters of the Unix desktop are GNOME contributors, including HP, MandrakeSoft, Novell (through Ximian), Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems.