Improving our integration with KDE application teams, and supporting companies

[Adriaan de Groot]

Mostly I'm repeating this item from Cornelius because it follows so well from 
what Valorie *originally* asked, rather than a bunch of misintepretations and 
discussing-something-else.

On Monday, 20 August 2018 10:58:05 CEST Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
> I don't think that anybody has a problem with having a healthy ecosystem of
> companies around KDE. That's not the debate we are having.

The thread started with Valorie exclaiming surprise that there was pushback on 
the entire notion of having companies / paid development around the KDE 
community. Some people have chimed in saying that that's not what they hear at 
all, so at this point I'm inclined to say that Valorie had the bad luck to run 
into one or two grumpy people.

[Disclosure: Cornelius is presumably paid to work on Free Software-ish things 
throughout the week; I am paid to work on Free Software things for at least 
half of the week, and am looking for more.]

But we could run a separate email thread with this question:

 - do we (as a community) want an ecosystem of companies and paid development 
around KDE?

 
> > For those people who claim that having paid people work on a Free Software
> > project will inevitably kill all motivation for volunteers, let's look at
> 
> > some examples within or close to KDE:
> We need to get clear on what we are debating. It's not that paid people are
> a problem. It's about how this is done and who is paying them.
> 
> We have a very conscious standing decision that KDE e.V. does not pay
> developers. This clearly separates paid and volunteer work there so that
> there can be no issue with harming volunteer motivation. We might want to
> revisit this decision but would need to be very clear about the governance
> of this work.

You're right. That's a very separate debate. That question is:

 - are there any circumstances under which KDE e.V. itself should fund 
development, by paying developers directly or hiring companies to do so?

.. and there's a third question, raised by yourself at Akademy and touched by 
Sven just now:

 - if KDE e.V. has money, and doesn't spend it directly on development, how 
can it best support KDE development indirectly?


These are three distinct questions, and really we should be very very clear on 
which one we're tackling (which, thank you, you have pointed out -- as has 
Sune, and others, and now I'm just repeating stuff :) )

[ade]
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