Fundraising in KDE

[Carl Schwan]

Le dimanche, septembre 27, 2020 10:52 AM, Karl Ove Hufthammer <karl at huftis.org> a écrit :

> Nicolas Fella skreiv 24.09.2020 11:42:
>
> > I would be cautious about creating a system that allows targeted
> > donations for specific features/requests. I don't want the e.V. to be in
> > a position where work is done/prioritized because it brings in money.
>
> I agree. KDE has a list of goals (https://kde.org/goals), which have
> been selected using a democratic process. It would, IMHO, be better to
> say that donations from companies will be used to hire developers to
> work towards KDE’s goals. Then the companies can decide if they think
> this a good thing or not.

Yes, this is also why I mentioned the goals in my demo: https://fund.carlschwan.eu/.
These are the goal selected by the entire KDE community (not just the e.V.)
and are cross projects. The Wayland goal for example can be about improving
KWin but it can also be about making Krita work perfectly on Wayland, ...

Note that my demo page is still work in progress and if we decice to go in this
direction, we shouldn't say that the money only goes to paying for development
towards the goals, but also towards the server costs, the sprints, and events
we are organizing and non developers contractors (who btw are doing an awesome
job).

Cheers,
Carl

>
> There are really three possibilities – a company wants work done that is
> a) aligned with KDE’s goals, b) against KDE’s goals or c) orthogonal to
> KDE’s goals. For (a), the above communication is fine. For (b),
> receiving money so the e.V. can hire people to work against the
> communities explicit goals seems like an extremely bad idea. For (c),
> there are no technical problems, but why should KDE e.V. actively spend
> money on something that really isn’t in KDE’s interest? There are other
> companies (https://ev.kde.org/consultants/) that the company can hire
> instead.
>
> So if a company donates/sponsors to KDE e.V., this should mean that
> they’re saying that they want to support KDE (and its goals). Currently,
> what the get back is very vague. But it can also be made explicit, e.g.,
> ‘if you support the e.V. with x amount of euros/dollars, the e.V.
> (promises that it) will hire a developer in a 20% position for a
> year/month to work towards KDE’s current goals’.
>
>
> Karl Ove Hufthammer