Fundraising in KDE

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Sunday, 27 September 2020 21:36:46 CEST Vincent Pinon wrote:


> 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...)

At this point, I'd advise you to do what I did: create a foundation, get a bank account and take donations in. For applications like Blender, Krita, Kdenlive that's really the only way to go because your users and potential supporters won't understand an umbrella organizagtion like KDE.

Especially once the majority of users is on Windows, the KDE story won't lead to donations. KDE needs to find its supporters in the free software and Linux world.

> 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...

Don't ask for too little. A 1€ application will be perceived as having less value and utility than a 10€ application. We went for 10€ on all platforms because we both wanted to undercut our 39,99€ competitors (Clip Studio and Affinity Photo) and because we wanted store customers to believe that Krita has a value.

> 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
> 
> 


-- 
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