KDE Asking for Donations
pointieststick.com
pointieststick.com
As an European, I love how there is an IBAN as possible payment option. I can just give money, no US third parties doing god knows what with your personal data and requiring a credit card.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Bank_Account_Num...
I don’t care if it’s GitHub sponsors or the project’s own page I try donate to open source. Neovim, Linux, etc etc have enriched my life so much that what I donate doesn’t begin to match the value I’ve received.
Donations to this recipient aren't supported in this country
Return to K Desktop Environment e.V.
That I'm prevented to send my own money throught a service I pay for to a recipient that is legal in my country is outrageous.
I'm sad the internet is spending so much energy cancelling the latest social faux pas, but things like that get barely a blink.
Also a good reason to fight against the deprecation of cash.
In today's society, we can't do much without money. It's a power bottleneck. And no system stays stable forever.
It's too bad stating this makes you fall into a political category, or labelled as some -ist.
Thinking about the society we want to shape should not sound weird.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_Ny-UPve-8
(Insert 50 pages long disclaimer here for the HN pedants wanting to point out it's all a scam, that it's not a currency, that it is actually subject to the whims of governments, that it has no value, that it boils the oceans, that it is not the only cryptocurrency, etc.)
There are more official break-downs of what donations are used for in the reports on the donations page: https://kde.org/donate/.
As for Nate's suggestions...
> extend an offer of full-time employment to our current people, and hire even more!
Great!
> I want us to end up with paid QA people and distro developers, and even more software engineers.
Great!
> I want us to fund the creation of a next-generation KDE OS
Um. No thanks? I use KDE because I like it a lot. It's great the way it is! Continuous incremental improvements are much better than a next-generation leap.
Better off focusing on the DE/applications. Their skill-set isn't distribution work, tangential only to their software. That's why I feel Neon based on Ubuntu made some sense. This makes less!
More fragmentation, advertising, and competition for limited resources in the space? Joy.
Can't wait until this, the downstream distribution packaging KDE, and N other applications are competing with Microsoft for worst user experience. Oh, wait.
He's talking about his dreams and personal advocacy if they get Wikimedia-like money.
To be realistic, though, I don't think a special distribution is the path. The places they want to be default do have derivatives/children/spins on offer, just not enough mind-share. Making another distribution confounds that further
I hope the intent is to really improve Neon, make it the best KDE Ubuntu that Canonical/others have to follow. Distribution work itself is so unrewarding
If you have any further questions on this, I'm KDE e.V.'s treasurer and happy to answer. :-)
> This is a question the KDE e.V. board of directors as a whole would need to answer, and any decision on it will be made collectively.
> But as one of the five members on that board, I can tell you my personal answer
(Additionally, if you're in Germany, a few years ago the laws changed and donations below a certain sum annually don't require an individualized form; for this purpose we have a standard one in the docs section of our website authorities will accept.)
At the moment we don't do this generally, but we've been dipping our toes into it somewhat in recent years.
One form this takes is that we now allow sub-project teams to do their own fundraising and "keep the money" while KDE e.V. takes an admin fee, turning us sort of into a financial service provider for KDE projects that is cheaper than places like Open Collective. Our pilot team making use of this is Kdenlive, who spend the money e.g. on contracting dev work on the app.
Another is that we once got a large donation earmarked for and on behalf of Calligra from the Handshake folks. That one to some extent highlights the reasons for our reluctance to do this more generally though - with the Calligra community fairly inactive, finding mechanisms to actually use this money has proven quite difficult so far.
Finally, and this one is probably most interesting to you: The KDE community runs a regular election for community-wide goals; during a past election, there was e.g. one elected for UI/UX consistency. At KDE e.V. we take this election as one of the best signals we have on where we are expected to allocate resources, e.g. funding related dev sprints, or contractor hours. So one of the best ways to effectively earmark money toward thematic/larger stuff, such as the UX consistency you mentioned, is to engage there with goal propsals, discussion, offering support, etc.
I think it's a good idea, although I don't know if this is what Nate is thinking of:
Almost every distro which ships KDE right now ships it with out of the box defaults, which are (frankly) bland because they aim to be common-denominator and unopinionated. I think that even includes neon. KDE as a platform advocates choice & customizability, so that's a legitimate choice.
Additionally, some of the distros make poor decisions and/or don't have many resources to fix their own bugs. I know the KDE team aren't super thrilled by Kubuntu, for example.
There's definitely room for a distro which takes KDE as a base and then tunes the hell out of it. Imagine trying to pull off what Elementary did, except using KDE as a base. There's a large userbase out there who want "just works" and "looks nice", which very few distros are providing well right now.
I'm torn by this. On the one hand, I see the need for the fundraising, and the points made in TFA about effectiveness are valid. This seems like a good move for KDE.
But, I worry this sets a terrible precedent in the Linux space. I hate ads, with a passion. I pay for premium versions of stuff (though usually not subscriptions) for an ad-free experience. Once we open the door and say that this type of thing is ok, I worry it's going to start showing up in other FOSS apps. Yes we can patch it out, but I don't want to have to go around patching all the tools to remove their popups!
I'm probably worrying about nothing, but since nobody else articulated this concern I figured I would.
But I'm from a subset of people, who didn't just immediately close the ad in mIRC, without booping his nose a few times.
It's nice when one app asks you for a simple donation. But then when everybody starts doing this, you are constantly dismissing dialogs, and getting interrupted on your own computer.
I only get ToS updates once a year from some of my subscriptions / accounts. Somehow my inbox is full of ToS updates constantly.
Here in Spain that 15 is already a lot so I can't really do more
Why do they need this? What are they doing there?
> Funding more and larger sprints
Why do sprints cost money? Are they paying developers?
What if we could direct donations to specific components of KDE? I have some longstanding bugs I’d be happy to pay someone to fix.
My understanding is that these events they host are sort of like conferences where they find some space and get hackers together for hack fests and to build stuff. It's collaborative and while they don't pay the devs, they have expenses.
I don't know how good the ROI is, but it's certainly an interesting model.
I just checked again and they now accept Github Sponsors. That is a good start. But I just tried throwing a few bucks their way and was told the minimum monthly donation is $5. Why? Other projects are happy with less than that.
Again, KDE. Lower. That. Bar. Stop giving people reasons to not donate to you. People going through this process are already doing something unnatural: giving away money for a free product. Stop making them pause and think about if they really want to continue!
For smaller amounts, I can imagine it would be better to save them some overhead and donate annually. They have a button for doing 10 EUR per year if you still wanted to help out. You can choose any amount that's at least 3 EUR. I imagine even 3 EUR per year would help! Here's the site if you can't find it: https://donorbox.org/kde-community