Improving our integration with KDE application teams, and supporting companies

[Valorie Zimmerman]

Just to follow up: many people have talked about this topic with me at
Akademy. What I'm not seeing is a public discussion here on the
community list. Note: I deliberately did not send this to the e.V.
list because this is not strictly an e.V. matter. I do believe that
the e.V. should support and welcome companies, but NOT hire
programmers.

I'm very frustrated to hear "but the e.V. should not hire developers"
said so often when that was not proposed.

Can we please discuss how we can best encourage companies and
foundations to grow up within the KDE community? I believe such
companies will support our work if we in turn support them. Our young
developers will be able to look forward to working in Free software
and even to contribute to the KDE codebase and other efforts! If there
are other ways we can grow our community and the surrounding ecosystem
we should discuss them as well. If we remain a project entirely
supported by volunteers, we can't grow large enough to make an impact.
I would like our work -- both volunteer and paid -- to make an impact
and actually change the world for the better.

This seems to be a controversial topic although I do not understand
why. This seems crucial to me, so please let's hash it out.

We need help to improve the usability of KDE's software and making it
more accessible and user-friendly for a wider variety of users.

We need help to offer users a complete software environment that helps
them to protect their privacy.

We need help to treamline the access for contributors, to improve our
documentation, and so much else.

We need to grow!

Valorie

On Sat, Aug 11, 2018 at 5:25 AM, Valorie Zimmerman
<valorie.zimmerman at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
> --
> http://about.me/valoriez



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