Improving our integration with KDE application teams, and supporting companies

[Dimitris Kardarakos]

As Cornelius has already mentioned, the debate is not about whether we want companies around the KDE community, or not. As long as we create high quality digital products, companies will always be around us.

Imho, what really matters is to start discussing on what kind of company ecosystem we want around our community. Afterwards, or maybe simultaneously, we may start talking about what we could do so as to construct such an ecosystem.

When I imagine this ecosystem, I see social purpose companies and not "only for profit" ones. These companies are governed by their social mission and not by their lust for profit and growth. I would be proud of a KDE "doing business" with companies that create products or provide services that fullfil social needs. Example: entrepreneurial initiatives to create privacy oriented, plasma mobile devices with long term support, made of recyclable components that users may substitute when broken.

Moreover, I see generative companies that improve the KDE output, allocating resources for upstream work. Although we cannot prevent extractive companies that just consume our work for making profit from existing, I do not see them as our partners, since they do not improve our community and jeopardize its sustainability.

In addition, I would like to cooperate with non hierarchical companies, where people do not work overtime to reach deadlines imposed on them by upper management. I' d really enjoy working with companies having as purpose to create livelihood for their members. And when success leads to the creation of surplus, the surplus would not be invested to financial products but it would be shared with the community, supporting KDE e.v. and more importantly, supporting similar entrepreneurial
initiatives.

So, this ecosystem does not consist of competitive companies. In a sustainable ecosystem the output of one is the input of the other. There should not exist companies that both create two distinct kirigami based file managers with similar features. Instead, companies that coordinate, working on different features and adding back to kirigami the components it lacks of, avoiding duplication of effort and wasting of resources, as well as reducing the environmental footprint.

In the vision of KDE is mentioned: 

"Of course, there is much more to life than the 'digital' part. While we all want freedom and control in the other parts too, influencing that is beyond KDE's scope, so we limit our vision to 'digital life'."

I believe that the creation of an ethical ecosystem that may allow contributors to make a living by working on what they really love is a huge step towards freedom.

On August 24, 2018 5:12:28 PM GMT+03:00, Sune Vuorela <nospam at vuorela.dk> wrote:
>On 2018-08-24, Cornelius Schumacher <schumacher at kde.org> wrote:
>> This was a quite complex situation, there were many factors involved.
>But 
>> again the negative feedback was not about the question if it's ok to
>pay 
>> developers but about other aspects of how the project was handled.
>
>And on some of those questions, Frank has later said at public talks
>that "KDE was right". (fosdem last year)
>
>/Sune

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