Da fuq? Ximian Desktop != Gnome Desktop. Ximian was a gnome enhancement and gave birth to mono and evolution, which was then acquired by Novell...who then later switched their default desktops to KDE. Go figure. ;)

Redhat is a heavy contributor to Gnome. Then again, Redhat is a heavy contributor to many things.

To make this relevant to the discussion, Fedora has no CLA like Ubuntu so if you feel like making patches to a more free OS, try there.