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
I would expect thunderbird to have more users.
It’s quite a popular alternative to outlook in the business world. I’ve set it up at several offices and I’ve seen it in the wild at hospitals.
That would explain part of it. The video I watched said something about a viral crowd-funding campaign and a very active social media team.
Are KDE apps linux only?
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.
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.
@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).
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.
Afaik the reason why they’re not using GitLab issues it’s missing some features they need, which Bugzilla has.
Yeah.
https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/Issue_Reporting/Why_not_GitLab_Issues
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.
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it probably also helps that thunderbird supports more payment methods.
