I can’t find KDE’s financial report, but in a video I watched it was claimed that Thunderbird collected more donations than KDE. It seems quite hard to believe, but in 2022 Thunderbird collected more than 6,4 million dollars.

KDE is an entire desktop environment, with a bunch of applications and even partnerships that have yielded a KDE laptop. Should Thunderbird have been able to collect more money than KDE itself, there might be something that KDE can learn from Thunderbird.

Edit: Added the link to the video that I watched

  • Troy
    10•1 year ago

    No, you can run most KDE apps on other systems, including Windows and Mac. I use Kate as my text editor on my windows work machine.

    I used to be a KDE dev. We were largely volunteers, unlike a lot of other FOSS projects that had hired coders. The KDE e.V. funding largely went to server maintenance and helping students attend the annual conference (travel expenses! I benefitted from this a few times). Not sure if it’s still like that. In my era, KDE could easily get by on less.

    • @parens@programming.devOP
      5•1 year ago

      Probably a lot more stuff would get done in KDE with more money, no? Big things like moving away from Bugzilla, supporting more languages like Python and Rust for KDE app development, (way) better documentation, marketing, ads, fulltime employees (marketing, UX/UI designers, developers, sysadmins, devops, lawyers, etc.).

      I’d love to work for KDE for example, but without having to first contribute to it for years, get recognised by some important community members, give talks, and then finally maybe see some money to work fullfime on a project. There are probably many, many developers who would rather write opensource code fulltime, remotely and be paid a livable wage instead of toiling away in some for-profit business writing proprietary code built on top of opensource and never contributing back to the greater good.

      • Carl Schwan :kde:
        5•1 year ago

        @parens @troyunrau Exactly, it took me 5 years from my first contribution to finally getting hired full time to work on some KDE and KDE related open source code. And I’m very prolific in term of contributions (https://invent.kde.org/carlschwan).

        It’s quite an issue to get money, the current budget KDE e.V. has is around 200 000€ a year and that pays for a few part time employees. I’m lucky that I found a company interested in developing a commercial open source project based on KDE (gnupg/g10 code).

      • @leopold
        2•1 year ago

        Is there any reason to move away from Bugzilla? Afaik the reason why they’re not using GitLab issues it’s missing some features they need, which Bugzilla has. Also afaict the language thing is more of a choice than anything. Qt already has excellent Python support, but having everything written in C++ and QML makes things easier. But yes, they definitely could use more money and more paid developers. KDE could really use more manpower.

        And yeah, a ton of devs would much rather be working on open source software, but if it’s not directly profitable it’s not gonna generate a lot of jobs. You need a lot of donations just to hire one developer full time. There’s always going to be a lot more jobs in closed source software than in open source.

        • @parens@programming.devOP
          1•1 year ago

          Is there any reason to move away from Bugzilla?

          UI and UX are terrible. Filing a bug against the right application is really difficult for me. Imagine how hard it is for the average user. Account creation is not easy (it sends you back and forth through multiple domains with multiple emails), finding the right project to file a report against takes a lot of clicks and guessing (is badly detected monitor a graphics problem, a desktop problem, a software screen configurator problem, a distro problem, or a linux kernel problem?), then it is not clear how to find or add logs, and I have never been able to get KDE’s crash handler to send off a bug report.

          Gitlab and Bugzilla are no the the only projects that exist for this. I don’t have suggestions right now as I’m just describing my experience.

          Also afaict the language thing is more of a choice than anything

          It’s a lack of choice. Qt’s support is not the issue, it’s KDE’s support for Python that’s the issue. Try writing a KDE widget or component in Python. Where is the KDE Python API documentation? https://github.com/KDE/pykde5 last commit is from 10 years ago. What is https://invent.kde.org/kdevelop/kdev-python ? The README just says “read installation instructions”.

          KDE Frameworks only has documentation for “C++ with Qt and QML”. The API documentation does not have a single mention of Rust nor Python.

          You need a lot of donations just to hire one developer full time. There’s always going to be a lot more jobs in closed source software than in open source.

          What I’m saying is that KDE could learn from Thunderbird. Imagine a budget of 6.5 million dollars for KDE. The money is there, it’s in people’s pockets, but there’s a reason they don’t donate to KDE.

          I donate periodically to KDE, but my major gripe is that I don’t know where the money is going. They have no financial reports that can be easily found, individual projects don’t have a donation button, there’s no public tracking of their income or expenditure like on opencollective, and it’s not easy to find KDE devs (aka who is actually on the KDE team) so that one could sponsor individual devs.

          Although I trust KDE more than Mozilla (MZ pays their CEO 7 million/year and invests in anything but Firefox, their most known project), I would much much much rather prefer it to know where the money goes.

          • @leopold
            1•1 year ago

            You misunderstood. I’m aware KDE doesn’t support languages other than QML and C++. I’m saying this is probably a choice on their behalf to make things easier to maintain. Whether or not this choice is good is up for debate, but I don’t think it is the result of a lack of funding.

            As for where your money goes, their donation page has a section on this which also links to annual reports. Some larger KDE projects do have their own donation buttons (like Kdenlive and Krita), but most don’t. A lot are just too small for it to be worth it, but this is still an area that can be improved. As for the “KDE Team”, that’s a pretty nebulous concept. I don’t think there is one, officially. KDE is a community of mostly volunteers working on KDE software. Most of the ones paid to work on KDE aren’t paid by donations, but are hired by third parties to work on KDE, like Blue Systems or Valve. Right now I believe most of the money is spent on infrastructure and events. Afaik, most of the people paid directly by donations are Krita and Kdenlive devs, since that’s what they raised their own funds for. KDE wants to start hiring more developers tho and I imagine their successful Plasma 6 fundraiser will allow them to do this.

            Also, keep in mind the fact that Mozilla software including Thunderbird is just significantly more popular than pretty much anything KDE makes. Yes, KDE is infinitely larger in scope than Thunderbird is, but Thunderbird sees a lot more mainstream professional use than any piece of KDE software and that’s what gets you money.

    • @leopold
      2•1 year ago

      Most KDE apps are Linux-only. More popular apps will often have some support for other operating systems, but that support is only good for the most popular apps, like Kate, Krita, Okular or Kdenlive.

      • Troy
        1•1 year ago

        There used to be (in the 4.x days) a general installer which allowed pretty much who whole KDE ecosystem to be installed on windows. Does that not exist anymore? I used to use Okteta on windows this way :)

        • @leopold
          3•1 year ago

          I’ve heard of this before, but as far as I know that no longer exists. Most of the KDE apps available on other operating systems can be found here: https://binary-factory.kde.org/. Okteta is indeed one of them, available on both macOS and Windows. There are definitely a fair amount, but many of these ports are in rough shape and this is still a small portion of total number of KDE apps available on Linux.