[kde-community] KDE fundraisers and things we've learned

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Tue, 23 Dec 2014, Jaroslaw Staniek wrote:

>> Well, KO GmbH wasn't involved with the Krita fundraiser at all -- that was
>> purely a volunteer effort in the Krita community. When we're out of the 2.9
>> crunch, we'll have to do another one, work on that will start in January,
>> and we really should go live with it in March.
>
> Strictly speaking, true, but what I mean: KO in this case were the
> enablers. Krita was a quite widely used and finished app prior to the
> fundraising efforts.

No, definitely no. This needs to be hammered home. KO GmbH never, ever was 
the Krita 'enabler'.

KO worked with Intel on two projects, Krita Sketch and Krita Gemini. Apart 
from improved Windows stability, neither project added core features to 
Krita. KO paid my salary, but I did things outside of Krita for KO. The 
core improvements for Krita that made Krita into a 
five-out-of-five-artist's-choice in January's ImagineFX were the work of 
the Krita community and the Krita Foundation.

When KO was already in some trouble, one of the things we tried was to 
start earning money by selling support for a product: the only product 
that was ready for end users in our competence was Krita. So that's what 
we tried to do. And with a better sales team and less distractions, we 
would have succeeded. We also sold Krita Gemini on Steam; that's something 
the Krita Foundation will try to continue doing.

All those Phoronix-type rumours of "krita has lost its main backer" are 
much exaggerated. KO never employed the majority of Krita developers, or 
even the most important one, because that's not me, that's Dmitry.

  >
> So risks of Catch-22 situations like these were reduced:
> [User] I'll start using your product and maybe even support you if you
> a add feature FOO;
> [Dev] We have this fundraising exactly for the feature FOO.
> [User] -EINVAL

That, basically, was the problem why we, at KO, couldn't sell support for 
Krita. "It's awesome, if you only add this, we'll start giving you 
money..."

Boudewijn