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Is it true that Thunderbird collected more donations than KDE?
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this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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KDE
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Probably a lot more stuff would get done in KDE with more money, no? Big things like moving away from Bugzilla, supporting more languages like Python and Rust for KDE app development, (way) better documentation, marketing, ads, fulltime employees (marketing, UX/UI designers, developers, sysadmins, devops, lawyers, etc.).
I'd love to work for KDE for example, but without having to first contribute to it for years, get recognised by some important community members, give talks, and then finally maybe see some money to work fullfime on a project. There are probably many, many developers who would rather write opensource code fulltime, remotely and be paid a livable wage instead of toiling away in some for-profit business writing proprietary code built on top of opensource and never contributing back to the greater good.
@parens @troyunrau Exactly, it took me 5 years from my first contribution to finally getting hired full time to work on some KDE and KDE related open source code. And I'm very prolific in term of contributions (https://invent.kde.org/carlschwan).
It's quite an issue to get money, the current budget KDE e.V. has is around 200 000€ a year and that pays for a few part time employees. I'm lucky that I found a company interested in developing a commercial open source project based on KDE (gnupg/g10 code).
Would you have any idea where to find the financial statements? I could not find that information anywhere
@parens The last financial report for 2022 is available https://ev.kde.org/reports/ev-2022/#working-groups_
and for 2021 https://ev.kde.org/reports/ev-2021/#working-groups_
Is there any reason to move away from Bugzilla? Afaik the reason why they're not using GitLab issues it's missing some features they need, which Bugzilla has. Also afaict the language thing is more of a choice than anything. Qt already has excellent Python support, but having everything written in C++ and QML makes things easier. But yes, they definitely could use more money and more paid developers. KDE could really use more manpower.
And yeah, a ton of devs would much rather be working on open source software, but if it's not directly profitable it's not gonna generate a lot of jobs. You need a lot of donations just to hire one developer full time. There's always going to be a lot more jobs in closed source software than in open source.
Yeah.
https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/Issue_Reporting/Why_not_GitLab_Issues
UI and UX are terrible. Filing a bug against the right application is really difficult for me. Imagine how hard it is for the average user. Account creation is not easy (it sends you back and forth through multiple domains with multiple emails), finding the right project to file a report against takes a lot of clicks and guessing (is badly detected monitor a graphics problem, a desktop problem, a software screen configurator problem, a distro problem, or a linux kernel problem?), then it is not clear how to find or add logs, and I have never been able to get KDE's crash handler to send off a bug report.
Gitlab and Bugzilla are no the the only projects that exist for this. I don't have suggestions right now as I'm just describing my experience.
It's a lack of choice. Qt's support is not the issue, it's KDE's support for Python that's the issue. Try writing a KDE widget or component in Python. Where is the KDE Python API documentation? https://github.com/KDE/pykde5 last commit is from 10 years ago. What is https://invent.kde.org/kdevelop/kdev-python ? The README just says "read installation instructions".
KDE Frameworks only has documentation for "C++ with Qt and QML". The API documentation does not have a single mention of Rust nor Python.
What I'm saying is that KDE could learn from Thunderbird. Imagine a budget of 6.5 million dollars for KDE. The money is there, it's in people's pockets, but there's a reason they don't donate to KDE.
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.
You misunderstood. I'm aware KDE doesn't support languages other than QML and C++. I'm saying this is probably a choice on their behalf to make things easier to maintain. Whether or not this choice is good is up for debate, but I don't think it is the result of a lack of funding.
As for where your money goes, their donation page has a section on this which also links to annual reports. Some larger KDE projects do have their own donation buttons (like Kdenlive and Krita), but most don't. A lot are just too small for it to be worth it, but this is still an area that can be improved. As for the "KDE Team", that's a pretty nebulous concept. I don't think there is one, officially. KDE is a community of mostly volunteers working on KDE software. Most of the ones paid to work on KDE aren't paid by donations, but are hired by third parties to work on KDE, like Blue Systems or Valve. Right now I believe most of the money is spent on infrastructure and events. Afaik, most of the people paid directly by donations are Krita and Kdenlive devs, since that's what they raised their own funds for. KDE wants to start hiring more developers tho and I imagine their successful Plasma 6 fundraiser will allow them to do this.
Also, keep in mind the fact that Mozilla software including Thunderbird is just significantly more popular than pretty much anything KDE makes. Yes, KDE is infinitely larger in scope than Thunderbird is, but Thunderbird sees a lot more mainstream professional use than any piece of KDE software and that's what gets you money.