Related to a previous post about Thunderbird collecting 6.4 million dollars in 2022 and KDE only 200k, I’m wondering why people do not donate or do not donate more to KDE.
What’s holding you back?
Here’s what I said in that thread
I donate periodically to KDE, but my major gripe is that I don’t know where the money is going. They have no financial reports that can be easily found, individual projects don’t have a donation button, there’s no public tracking of their income or expenditure like on opencollective, and it’s not easy to find KDE devs (aka who is actually on the KDE team) so that one could sponsor individual devs.
Although I trust KDE more than Mozilla (MZ pays their CEO 7 million/year and invests in anything but Firefox, their most known project), I would much much much rather prefer it to know where the money goes.
I donate periodically to KDE, but my major gripe is that I don’t know where the money is going. They have no financial reports that can be easily found
The yearly reports of the KDE e.V. can be found in https://kde.org/community/donations/
individual projects don’t have a donation button
this is because giving money individually to a KDE subproject is a lot of logistic and unless the project is big and receive a lot of money, the amount collected for the individual project won’t be enough to do anything meaningful for the project. But we had a trial with Kdenlive specific fundraising, which worked reasonably well last year so maybe we will see more subprojects specific fundraising in the future.
there’s no public tracking of their income or expenditure like on opencollective
yeah aside from the graphs in https://ev.kde.org/reports/ev-2022/#working-groups_ we don’t publish detailed logs of every single transactions as they contain private details like how much our contractors are getting paid. KDE e.V. is a registered non-profit in Germany and the tax offices is very vigilant that nothing weird happens.
it’s not easy to find KDE devs (aka who is actually on the KDE team) so that one could sponsor individual devs
This developers accepting donations often have this info on their website. It’s also possible to find KDE related people on liberapay https://liberapay.com/search?q=kde
Thanks Carl.
My search query was “financial report” and I stopped scrolling after after a few seconds on the page. Maybe working with tabs on that page or having a table of contents would help. I was honestly expecting a PDF 🤔 I find the way wikipedia does it really good https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/ . A simple “wikipedia financial report” query brings me to their page.
this is because giving money individually to a KDE subproject is a lot of logistic and unless the project is big and receive a lot of money, the amount collected for the individual project won’t be enough to do anything meaningful for the project. But we had a trial with Kdenlive specific fundraising, which worked reasonably well last year so maybe we will see more subprojects specific fundraising in the future.
I kinda understand. As said before, I do trust KDE more than I do Mozilla, who uses the exact same response to say “you can’t donate towards Firefox” and then you see what they do with the money - it doesn’t go to firefox.
Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but seeing a moneyflow graph, diagram or just simple table of how the pot is split by project would be amazing. The current table doesn’t mention a single project. Maybe personnel just jumps between projects as they see fit and don’t contribute to a single project, which would make tracking difficult? I assume that’s the case.
At the very least adding the option for people donating to say “my money is for all of KDE, but I’m donating because of project XYZ” would give you data on which projects people really value and a bit of a reason why they use KDE.
This developers accepting donations often have this info on their website
I would very much appreciate a section on the donation page or even a separate page of “Contributors”, projects they are involved in / function / what they do, and official links to their donation options (liberapay, github account, paypal, website with payment information, crypto address, whatever).
Because liberapay is a third-party website and I’d have to first verify that the in the search query actually does contribute to KDE.
Because I’m broke.
I think the reason Thunderbird got so much is because of it’s Windows based users. KDE really only has Linux based users, which is nowhere near the same amount of people.
Krita has far more Windows users than Linux users, so does GCompris, and very probably Kdenlive too, to mention 3 of the bigger (in terms of userbase) KDE products. Many more KDE app projects are currently compiling their products for several OSes (Linux, Windows, macOS, Android and iOS)
Krita has far more Windows users than Linux users, so does GCompris, and very probably Kdenlive too, to mention 3 of the bigger (in terms of userbase) KDE products.
And all of them combined have fewer users than Firefox and Thunderbird which both nag people to donate.
Many more KDE app projects are currently compiling their products for several OSes (Linux, Windows, macOS, Android and iOS)
With exceptions like Krita, Windows support is second tier for most (things like weird icon sizes and window positions) and even for applications that support Windows well, there is little interest in promoting the Windows version, even though there’s a decent chance this would improve the developer pool. I’m fairly convinced that had Windows support been a bigger priority, the KOffice/Calligra would have had a chance to survive against OpenOffice/LibreOffice, especially considering that it could have worked with Kontact the way MS Office has Outlook. Kontact even had reasonably good Windows support before the move to the whole Akonadi thing.
I’m a poor student living in a poor country. I’m contributing with telemetry and bug reports instead. I’ve thought about helping with development, but they seem to mostly need C++ developers and I don’t happen to be one, unfortunately.
I’m poor (income is ~20% below US poverty line) and only vaguely understand how things work and speak one language. So I have no money, wouldn’t trust my advice to fix things or explain them and translations can be done better with other resources than me. I did try to make wallpapers and icons for a few things but they weren’t professional looking enough to share. As I learn more I hope to contribute more in any way I can, if I’m confident it will help, but for now the best thing for me is to stay out of the way.
There are many ways of contributing to Free Software with your efforts. That you are seriously considering it is already very much appreciated. Maybe you should think about signing up to one of KDE’s mentorship programs (excuse the bare bones website, it is still work in progress)? These would help you get the foot in the door of contributing with someone to guide you, and even a foot in the door of the IT industry.
