KDE Asking for Donations

https://pointieststick.com/2024/08/28/asking-for-donations-in-plasma/

by maverick74 • 2 years ago

131 44 2 years ago

mkl3• 2 years ago

I use KDE a lot, and have for almost 20 years. I far prefer it to all other desktop environments I've tried. I've never donated though, as I don't remember ever seeing anything asking me to, so I consider this change to be a good thing - very discreet and once-a-year is very different to most such things. I guess I'm not "plugged into these communications channels".

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.

bravetraveler2• 2 years ago

I overlooked the part about 'a next generation KDE OS'... what do they really think they'll achieve here they haven't with Neon? Wrong direction in this regard, IMO.

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.

mkl3• 2 years ago

Yes, hopefully the board that makes the decision will understand that. Or maybe improving Neon is what is meant there. There are certainly plenty of abandoned Linux distributions to demonstrate the folly of such thinking.

abhinavk• 2 years ago

I want us to fund the creation of a next-generation KDE OS we can offer directly to institutions looking to switch to Linux, and a hardware certification program to go along with it. I want us to to extend our promotional activities and outreach to other major distros and vendors and pitch our software to them directly. I want to see Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop ship Plasma by default. I want us to use this money to take over the world — with freedom, empowerment, and kindness.

He's talking about his dreams and personal advocacy if they get Wikimedia-like money.

sho_hn4• 2 years ago

There are more official break-downs of what donations are used for

If you have any further questions on this, I'm KDE e.V.'s treasurer and happy to answer. :-)

remram• 2 years ago

What is this "KDE OS" you want to fund? And why do you think it's a good idea?

severine• 2 years ago

Will I get a certificate of donation for tax purposes? Do you fill the corresponding forms?

sho_hn4• 2 years ago

Someone asked if there's a way to earmark donations toward specific purposes. They deleted their comment while I was replying, but I saved it:

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.

smallerfish• 2 years ago

I want us to fund the creation of a next-generation KDE OS

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.

kombine• 2 years ago

I agree that this is a great idea. I use KDE Neon on many of my machines, but it's a subpar experience. People ask the same question on the webforums all the time: what is the best KDE distro? Having a flagship KDE distribution where KDE developers would be in full control is something that has been hurting the project for a while. One can think about Apple who is in control of its entire ecosystem all the way down to designing their own CPUs.

fooqux• 2 years ago

I've used KDE for a long time. This isn't the first time I've looked into donating to them. However, it's never been easy. Maybe if I were in the EU, the options offered would be great, but as an american used to just giving a CC number or using a service like Patreon to help manage it, the level of effort was too high. If you want lots of money, lower that bar.

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!

BeefWellington• 2 years ago

Their donation page does do exactly that, it's just priced in Euros and uses PayPal.

mazugrin2• 2 years ago

For monthly donations, the minimum is actually 3 EUR. And it's super easy to do from the US - just enter a CC number and billing address. What would be a lower bar?

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

jonkoops• 2 years ago

There is PayPal if you go to their donate page, literally big American corporate. As a European (specifically Dutch), I have always HATED credit cards with a fiery passion, and dealing with big American corporations and their messy and buggy experiences on the web. In this regard many foreign systems such as iDeal, UPI, WeChat Pay and Alipay feel like they are straight from the future. But to each their own.

hyperman1• 2 years ago

Great initiative. I've been using KDE for 15 years now. Should have donated ages ago. Feel free to ask again next year ;-)

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.

sph2• 2 years ago

TIL the International Bank Account Number (IBAN) isn't truly international.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Bank_Account_Num...

gessha• 2 years ago

Well, it is international, it just isn’t worldwide.

jrepinc• 2 years ago

I also love this. One of the reasons, besides Plasma being the best desktop and KDE software being awesome, I regularly donate to KDE.

noisy_boy• 2 years ago

Tried to donate using Paypal and got this error:

    Donations to this recipient aren't supported in this country
    Return to K Desktop Environment e.V.

Funny that in this monetization-est period of tech, easily giving money away is still not a solved problem :)

ta988• 2 years ago

Worked for me right now (from the US).

BiteCode_dev• 2 years ago

I know it's trendy to crap on crypto on HN, but my first real life use case was making a donation to wikileaks because visa refused to do it.

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.

sph2• 2 years ago

The way I see it, 90+% of the price of Bitcoin might be speculation, scams, black market, whatever you dislike the most. The rest is honest value for the only robust asset that can be exchanged across any border and is not subject to the whims of governments and bureaucrats. It is the "digital currency for the Internet age" Milton Friedman was describing in 1999.

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.)

Tiberium• 2 years ago

Yeah, I have the same issue - I cannot use Paypal nor IBAN to donate to KDE, but I have money in crypto that I could've donated them, but I literally cannot. Too bad the German laws are set up this way (https://kde.org/community/donations/others/ - "KDE e.V. does not accept donations of "crypto" coins: Bitcoin, Etherium, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and all the others. The tax regime that covers German non-profit associations considers those coins a form of speculation which would endanger our non-profit status, so regretfully you cannot donate them directly. Cash out and then use a traditional method to donate.")

cpburns2009• 2 years ago

You can also donate through GitHub: https://github.com/sponsors/KDE

Am4TIfIsER0ppos• 2 years ago

I'll pay you for the option to have ISO dates in all your programs like existed way back when. And before anyone queries my locale is already correctly set up but all the c++ or qt code chooses to ignore it.

gigatexal2• 2 years ago

I support as many open projects as I can. Hell i send the haiku project monthly and I don’t even have a vm with it installed I just had such a good experience with BeOS back in the day I wanted to support the hackers. This i do by IBAN transfer.

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.

waddlesplash• 2 years ago

(One of the Haiku developers here. Thanks for your support!)

gigatexal2• 2 years ago

No no thank you! Y’all are awesome!

devinprater• 2 years ago

I donate to KDE in the hopes that my $20 per month could help fund accessibility improvements.

slightwinder• 2 years ago

Organizing and hosting larger Akademy events

Why do they need this? What are they doing there?

Funding more and larger sprints

Why do sprints cost money? Are they paying developers?

lldb• 2 years ago

I was about to donate until I read things like this and their initiatives like promotion. The incentives are all wrong - donations should go to actual expenses (hosting, hardware, dev meetups, bounties on large contributions), not amassing influence. Wikimedia is an example of everything wrong with not-for-profits, not a model to emulate.

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.

freedomben2• 2 years ago

Disclaimer: I don't know this personally, just going on what I heard on a podcast.

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.

freedomben2• 2 years ago

I guess I'll take the opposing stance.

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.

Cordiali• 2 years ago

One ad per tool? Yeah, that'd get annoying. But KDE is more than one tool, there's at least half a dozen KDE programs that I like and use, like Yakuake, Kate, KDE Connect, etc. So at least in that sense, the ad-to-tool ratio is alright for me.

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.

wilsonnb3• 2 years ago

It isn't an ad, though, it's just a donation request.

olyjohn• 2 years ago

It's still a pop up that comes up trying to get you to give them money.

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.

BizarroLand• 2 years ago

It would be nice if there was a way to disable it permanently. Like, make a 1 time donation of $5 USD and get a code to permanently disable it on 1 install or something if you so desire.

mac-attack• 2 years ago

Never hurts to read the article first: "It’s small and unobtrusive, and no matter what you do with it (click any button, close it, etc) it’ll go away until next year. It’s implemented as a KDE Daemon (KDED) module, which allows users and distributors to permanently disable it if they like. You can also disable just the popup on System Settings’ Notifications page, accessible from the configure button in the notification’s header."

wkat42422• 2 years ago

I donate 15€ monthly already. I get a lot of use out of it <3 only issue I have is that it's not always ideal on FreeBSD. But I can't blame them for not prioritising an OS with 0.01% marketshare :)

Here in Spain that 15 is already a lot so I can't really do more

KDE Asking for Donations

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