parens

joined 10 months ago
[–] parens 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Broken or broke?

[–] parens 3 points 10 months ago

Thanks Carl.

My search query was "financial report" and I stopped scrolling after after a few seconds on the page. Maybe working with tabs on that page or having a table of contents would help. I was honestly expecting a PDF 🤔 I find the way wikipedia does it really good https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/ . A simple "wikipedia financial report" query brings me to their page.

this is because giving money individually to a KDE subproject is a lot of logistic and unless the project is big and receive a lot of money, the amount collected for the individual project won’t be enough to do anything meaningful for the project. But we had a trial with Kdenlive specific fundraising, which worked reasonably well last year so maybe we will see more subprojects specific fundraising in the future.

I kinda understand. As said before, I do trust KDE more than I do Mozilla, who uses the exact same response to say "you can't donate towards Firefox" and then you see what they do with the money - it doesn't go to firefox.
Maybe it's wishful thinking, but seeing a moneyflow graph, diagram or just simple table of how the pot is split by project would be amazing. The current table doesn't mention a single project. Maybe personnel just jumps between projects as they see fit and don't contribute to a single project, which would make tracking difficult? I assume that's the case.

At the very least adding the option for people donating to say "my money is for all of KDE, but I'm donating because of project XYZ" would give you data on which projects people really value and a bit of a reason why they use KDE.

This developers accepting donations often have this info on their website

I would very much appreciate a section on the donation page or even a separate page of "Contributors", projects they are involved in / function / what they do, and official links to their donation options (liberapay, github account, paypal, website with payment information, crypto address, whatever).

Because liberapay is a third-party website and I'd have to first verify that the in the search query actually does contribute to KDE.

[–] parens 1 points 10 months ago

That would be a place to upvote and ask progress on. Do you have a link?

[–] 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

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

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.

[–] parens 1 points 10 months ago

Doesn't work for me either. Tried some other random language and it didn't work either, so I'm assuming only "Undetermined" works.

[–] parens 2 points 10 months ago
[–] 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.

[–] parens 12 points 10 months ago (6 children)
[–] parens 7 points 10 months ago (28 children)

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?

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

If third party apps don’t select a language, won’t that just be Undetermined?

I’m not sure how it makes it more simple than just letting people state the language of their post 🤔

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

Wouldn't surprise me if it's because he's overloaded with messages, but if the lemmy community becomes large or loud enough not to ignore, then something might change.

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