Acronym of GNUNetwork Object Model Environment.
The GNOME project (pronounced with a hard "G") is a collaborative software project building a complete user-friendly graphic user interface (GUI) entirely with free software components. GNOME is a GUI for GNU/Linux/Unix systems. GNOME's most apparent distinction is that it's built on the GimpToolKit. Components of GNOME include GConf, Nautilus, a virtual filesystem layer (gnome-vfs), and more.
GNOME is the Desktop of choice for business Linux and has been adopted by the likes of IBM and SunMicrosystems:, this is partly due to the LGPL'd GTK2 core, which at a time made GNOME more Free than the competing KDE, and at the same time cheaper (developers don't need to fork out to TrollTech for a non-GPL version of Qt) to develop commercial software for.
Much development on GNOME was undertaken by a company named Ximian, set up by GNOME founder MiguelDeIcaza to develop GNOME commercially. Ximian was purchased by Novell; most of their commercial code has been set free and the Ximian crew are now Novell's Linux desktop team.
See also:
100 pages link to GNOME:
