One of the Gnome Foundations primary missions is "Fund Receipt and Disbursement": "The foundation will be in charge of disbursing these funds to the benefit of GNOME and, to the extent possible, in accordance with the wishes of the benefactor" (https://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Resources/Charter).
The funding of the OPW sounds like it's completely appropriate here. Several benefactors and organizations have wanted to fund this activity, and the Gnome Foundation provides the means for them to do so.
> Why is the Gnome Foundation is funding and administering this program to begin with?
It is a multi-organizational program, between several different projects. It looks like rather than setting up a whole new organization just for this one program, they decided to have one group do the organization and running of the program, while the other groups contribute money to that one. It can be expensive and inefficient to set up too many new organizations; there is a lot of overhead to a new organization.
It looks like the problem is that because the OPW funds internships, the Gnome Foundation winds up having to pay them at a steady rate, while it may get payments from the other organizations in lump sums. It sounds like the Gnome Foundation has not been keeping up with invoicing the other organizations, so while they'll be in the black once everyone settles up, right now they've run short of cash on hand due to all of the outstanding balances.
> it absolutely should not financially impact Gnome's ability to ship Gnome.
Is shipping Gnome the job of the Gnome foundation? As far as I can tell, the foundation is there to organize conferences, run the server infrastructure, and run programs like the OPW. Actual development is mostly done by member companies, like Red Had and SUSE.
> Given that the outreach program was started in response to the lack of women candidates for Google's Summer of Code, this program could (and given fiduciary responsibilities, should) have focused solely on non-exclusionary outreach to women Summer of Code candidates.
That's not necessarily the best way to address the problem. It may be that certain aspects of how Google's Summer of Code works inherently biased towards men; or at least, people who are already fairly comfortable in the community and with open source software, which given the current substantial gender imbalance in the community, can mean that it's not really a suitable way to encourage more women to get involved.
Running the internships separately from the Google Summer of Code is perfectly fine; they just need to do a better job of managing the finances.