this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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KDE

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KDE is an international technology team creating user-friendly free and open source software for desktop and portable computing. KDE’s software runs on GNU/Linux, BSD and other operating systems, including Windows.

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Is it true that Thunderbird collected more donations than KDE? (tube.kockatoo.org)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by parens to c/[email protected]
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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

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (12 children)

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 5 points 10 months ago (7 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (2 children)

@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).

[–] parens 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Would you have any idea where to find the financial statements? I could not find that information anywhere

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