Ok, I'll say it. Thank you, German Government -- open-source needs funding, and organisations like yours helps to keep things going, making sure we get cool new features :)
really? Executives are quite important in making sure the organization they're in charge of is well run, efficient and reaches the stated goals.
Paying a low salary to an executive for a non-profit will merely make the non-profit less efficient at achieving their goals. Just because it's a non-profit, doesn't mean the workers in the organization should be self-sacrificing their own salary (by accepting a lower-than-market rate).
Now, there's a point to be made where if an executive's achievements or effectiveness at directing the organization is poor, they need to be booted, or at least have performance incentives etc.
As for the grant being tax-payer funded, i don't see why it is any worse a form of spending than welfare.
So 100k salaries are totally a thing in Germany for white collar employees.
On the "life changing" aspect, consider this thread is about German market and therefore cost of living. Given that, I'm confident to say 100k is not life changing. Comfortable salary range? yes absolutely, but not something you can just get this amount once and be sorted for life.
The context here is completely different though, we are talking about specialized white collar jobs in the German/european market.
Certainly not a reason to criticize the German government for this great initiative.
It also set a good example for startup folks that use a lot of open source and in most cases give nothing back.
For an executive this is a low salery, even in Germany.
Sorry, but simply not true. You might want to look into statistics and not extrapolate from your vicinity.
https://www.glassdoor.de/Geh%C3%A4lter/prokurist-gehalt-SRCH...
And we are including müllers it services here
Here is the Glassdoor page for "software manager" in Germany:
https://www.glassdoor.de/Gehälter/software-manager-gehalt-SR...
As you can easily see, the job pays up to 150k, with 100k on average.
Where is the truth?
If a non-profit hires a janitor, should they pay the janitor less?
As someone who runs a tiny hyper-local non profit (we take in a few thousand $s a year), running a non profit requires as much, if not more, work than running a for profit business.
One reason why we have such awful non profits is that they don’t pay enough to compete for the best talent.
Of course the org can make money and keep it for later.
Being the trust-fund offspring of a deity, he had it made from birth. But that's not how the story goes.
It shows humility and puts you on the same level of vulnerability as others. It's what separates you from the gentry. You give everything of yourself to help others, to prove you're one of them, and inspire others to help in kind.
Which land and business domain is that?
You need to work on your negotiating skills
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/43572...
(Yes, I too was surprised to learn that Gnome is now run by a self-described Shaman with no engineering experience)
Then you haven't been paying attention for what your GEZ fees are being spent on.
I can't speak specifically for Germany, but in the UK Germany has a reputation for paying better, and €100k would be pretty par-for-the-course for a senior developer, and stingy for a staff/principal engineer.
That might be part of the point of the money.
Also, gnome isn't going anywhere, it's been around for decades, and we watched Ubuntu the most popular distro by google trends move away from gnome only to go back to gnome a while later
I'm still convinced every desktop environment should be a physics simulator - 2D or 3D. If you want consistent animations, changes of state, etc. you don't hardcode these into your application. Your application should exist in a physics simulator. Your windows are objects with layers. You're looking at a composited view of them. In 2023 we have the hardware and the know-how to run physics simulators as your desktop environments.
</tinfoil-hat>
Also, as you can see on my comments history, most of my GNU/Linux use is on VMs and servers, since VMWare got good enough I have stopped the dual boot dance.
While I half agree with you that there may be better sources for this funding, I'm happy for any serious open source funding, and the (hopefully positive!) attention it receives from that
(And this comes from a long-term i3 user who loathes using heavy DEs :P)
We can pretty reliable say that Gnome will be around for a long time.
Looking at the list on https://sovereigntechfund.de/en/ my highlights are:
Improving the security of the Python and JavaScript ecosystem, this was very much needed, curl, wireguard, and OpenSSH.
I am aware of a few German cities having a custom SuSE version with KDE on their libraries, for the employees and terminals available to the public.
I am not quite sure how kalendar, korganizer and kontact fit together.
Let's assume KDE and Gnome are equally good in every single aspect. In this case, don't you think it's a little bit weird that German government chooses Gnome over KDE, whose origin in Germany? It's not charity, but taxpayers' money.
>I find it [...] surprising that the top comment [...] is criticising the effort
Nothing about it being immune to criticism, just surprised that the dominant post (as the time) was critical. The puzzle of successfully funding open source is ever present. A government has made a meaningful investment in an open source project. It might not be your favourite project, and it doubtless has challenges. But I'm with GP in seeing this as net good news.
Yeah, the criticism of the effort absolutely seems misplaced.
Even the criticism of the money going to Gnome seems misplaced unless someone has gone through the criteria and identified which criteria they find unhelpful, or goes through Gnome’s application and identifies where they’ve misidentified.
Otherwise a criticism of the effort sounds simply like someone who has done no work at all, looks at an effort that has clearly put in a lot of process and safeguards (as evident simply from the application submitted), didn’t like the result but out of sheer laziness don’t even try to identify what went wrong and decided to piss all over the people who are actually putting in money, time, resources and effort to do something.
Unfortunately this is quite common in the open source world. People who don’t actually do any of the work (which includes me, even if I’ve submitted a few PRs) that go around telling the people doing the actual work that they’re doing it wrong without putting in the effort to show how or why they’re doing it wrong.
Not at all. GNOME filled up an application for Sovereign Tech Fund and received the grant for stated purposes. In order for KDE to receive it too, someone from the project would have to apply first and their request would have to be evaluated positively too.