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@programming.dev to c/kde@lemmy.kde.social

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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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[–] troyunrau@lemmy.ca 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@programming.dev 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.

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 2 points 10 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] herzenschein@pawb.social 2 points 10 months ago

Afaik the reason why they're not using GitLab issues it's missing some features they need, which Bugzilla has.