Fundraising in KDE

[Vincent Pinon]

Le 9/27/20 à 10:52 AM, Karl Ove Hufthammer 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.
>
> 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’.

Hello,

For several years, and more and more often, the topic of paying devs 
appears on Kdenlive channels.

Very regularly, we have video editors asking how to give money (amounts 
10€ to 100€) to boost development of that tool highly useful for them.
When we answer to give to KDE, who shares the infrastructure and funds 
the sprints, they express they would prefer a more dedicated donation to 
pay for development (bug solving, feature development...)

The tiny team can't answer these requests on spare time (or it takes 
years). No one is ready to abandon their job, finding a good person to 
hire seems not easy, maybe contracting a consultant would be a 
solution... But then how to gather the funds? As KDE eV can't allocate 
money to a specific project (if I understand correctly), we would need 
to create a new structure: none of us is interested in this kind of 
paperworks and risks associated (having read about Krita Fundations 
difficulties few years back)...

Also, we know that our Windows downloads are increasing by tens of 
thousands every month, it was also suggested to ask for 1€ (or free 
amount) for these binaries (as GCompris also did sometime), but again, 
where to put that money ? It could be for eV (?)
I haven't been motivated to look at the stores stuff, as long as we 
don't know where to put the money...

So my questions are :
can eV gather money from Kdenlive binaries on Windows ? (and maybe Mac 
someday, both thanks to Craft and binary-factory \o/)
Can it use it (or part of) to pay consultants on that project ? If not, 
is anyone ready to help for the extra administrative work ?

It's true that not accepting these donations maybe holds back that 
project from increasing as rapidly as many users are expecting...

Thanks for all the great things in KDE,

Vincent