[kde-community] Request to join the Kde incubator for GCompris

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Wednesday, February 19, 2014 21:18:25 Thomas Zander wrote:
> The beliefs of freedom are not at all hurt by someone taking that FLOSS and
> packaging it for a fee. There is no incompatibility there.

Agreed, and this could be an opportunity to explore what is possible there.

Perhaps the way we’ve been distributing KDE applications on platforms such as 
Windows and Mac is not the best. KDE Connect already goes through an 
application store on Android, though it is made available at no cost. People 
can always get the sources and build for themselves, but for these other 
platforms it could make sense to offer binaries via app stores and even charge 
a small fee.

I know that I would happily pay a couple euros (or whatever) for KDE Connect 
on Android ...

I do think we should keep the discussions of monetization separate from 
community hosting, however. They are not related, as can be seen by all the 
Linux distros who take the source code we write and monetize it. Some give 
back (some do so significantly, in fact), others don’t .. we don’t seem to be 
bothered by it.

So definitely a topic for further discussion, and one that is sure to have a 
variety of points of view within KDE ... but perhaps we should separate it 
from issues of hosting projects. Our manifesto says nothing about 
monetization, probably because that isn’t part of the core values that defines 
KDE’s identity: freedom and community do.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo