Fundraising in KDE

[Philippe Cloutier]

Le 2020-09-27 à 04:52, 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.


While this could perhaps be clarified, those are Goals with a capital 
"G". KDE obviously also wants to be more performant, lighter, more 
accessible, more portable, more multilingual, more secure, more stable, 
etc. There is no way to make an exhaustive list of KDE's goals (in the 
literal sense).


> 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.


A company can also want work which is:

 1. In KDE's top priorities
 2. Half as high as #1 in our priorities.
 3. Half as high as #2 in our priorities.
 4. Half as high as #3 in our priorities.

...and the list goes on. But we don't care about such categories, except 
for one thing: we don't want work against our goals. And all it takes to 
avoid that is realism. Promising work against our goals is unrealistic, 
since developers will not manage to integrate work against our goals. 
Just like we shouldn't promise to achieve something in exchange for 
insufficient funding, we shouldn't promise to achieve something whose 
net value to KDE is negative.

KDE consists in many different individuals with widely different goals. 
We don't require developers to do work which advances KDE's top 
priorities. One reason is many developers don't have the necessary 
skills, but an equally important reason is that developers are 
volunteers whose priorities are not KDE's, so forcing them to work on 
KDE's priorities rather than theirs would reduce their motivation.

It's understandable that allowing targeted donations requires work, but 
ignoring that, there is no reason why we should *intentionally* decline 
donators (whether these are companies, other organizations or 
individuals) all freedom to choose what they help with. Perhaps donators 
don't have the necessary expertise to contribute directly, but that is 
no reason to force them to contribute to our top priorities. We will get 
way more donations if we allow donators to specify how their donations 
should be used.

On the other hand, we must be aware that we will use the received money 
less efficiently on average. For example, if a donator gives 10€ for a 
change which we estimate costs 100€, then it could be that it takes 
years before we can fund a developer to use that money. And I guess this 
can create fair challenges; if a donator specified a donation should 
only be used for an improvement to a specific product, and then that 
product is officially abandoned/EOL-ed, do we refund the same amount to 
the donator?

>
> [...]
>
-- 
Philippe Cloutier
http://www.philippecloutier.com

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