Improving our integration with KDE application teams, and supporting companies

[Valorie Zimmerman]

On Sat, Aug 11, 2018 at 4:01 AM, Gilles Caulier
<caulier.gilles at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 2018-08-11 12:34 GMT+02:00 Valorie Zimmerman <valorie.zimmerman at gmail.com>:
>>
>> Hello folks, I've recently spent a week with Boud and Irina Rempt at
>> their invitation. I hope that this sort of generous hospitality
>> becomes the norm in our our KDE family. While there, we had many
>> conversations about the past, present and future of KDE. I was
>> surprised to learn that during the life of KO, Boud's previous company
>> with Inga Wallin and now with his small company which supports Krita,
>> he encountered quite a bit of opposition *in the KDE community*!
>
>
> Hi Valorie,
>
> What do you mean exactly by "opposition" ?
>
> Best
>
> Gilles Caulier

Opposition in the form not of "this is how I think you could do this
better" but "what a horrible idea to pay people to support KDE
software for MONEY!" and "What, another foundation? And to pay
developers? Terrible thing."

I was shocked to hear that such thoughts were expressed to the very
people doing the work to support KDE in a professional way.

In addition there is the widespread opinion that amateurs are better
than professionals for KDE, and that if there are professionals
working on software, that the volunteers will leave. In fact, this
idea seems widespread in the FOSS world. From what I have seen,
professionals can *increase* volunteer contributions, by laying the
groundwork for successful onboarding, by paying attention to details
which volunteers left undone or did improperly, by doing work that no
volunteers have the skills or interest in doing, in ensuring that
documentation is up-to-date, by thinking of tasks such as training
sessions for bug-triage, documentation writing, packaging, testing
days and so forth.

Valorie

-- 
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