Incredible, the last two months absolutely crushed on the first day of December and all it took was a single desktop notification. This is just the paypal donations as well. You can take a look at the data for yourself here.
first thunderbird, now kde. looks like this will become standard practice for free software, which is a good thing. people take for granted the amount of work that goes into tools that help them daily, but i believe that it’s mostly because they think whoever is making the software is fine without their help. this is basically saying “hey! actually, your support would be very helpful to us!”, which is enough to make people want to help
I think the way this should be done is that there should be a service that you pay a fixed amount to monthly, and it tracks how long you use each open source software that month, and splits your money between each of those (and their subprojects) accordingly. Donation credentials could be scraped off Github: tons of repos have a ‘buy me a coffee’ button iirc.
Edit: actually I feel quite tempted to program this now. Just don’t know how to handle the legal liability of being paid money and trusted to redistribute it.
Even just the tracking would be helpful. Track what you use and then a notification each month where you put in how much you want to donate, it tells you how much should go to each thing, and then gives you links to their donate page. I’d love to see my split, even if just to adjust my monthly donations or to see if I’m missing any.
However, a significant number of the services I use are self-hosted websites. Tracking that may be a bit tricky.
I’d rather not get tracked at all.
This is not a suggestion to have KDE track users, it’s a proposal to build software you could optionally use to help you assign donations to services you use. I would expect the data to be local, and if you don’t want to be tracked then you wouldn’t install it.
Well yeah, I get the sentiment, but it would be one vulnerability away from sharing my tracked information to malicious actors. Would also probably need elevated permissions to be able to do its job.
Not worth the risk in my opinion. Same as I don’t want kernel level anticheats and yada yada.
There are some projects that are incredibly useful only for a short amount of time. That could throw it off a bit.
There are also other ways to donate https://kde.org/community/donations/others/ not only paypal. Paypal is as free as a zoo animal
It worked on me 🤷. I always have the intention to donate, but life is busy and stressful. If they put a button in front of me that takes me to a donation portal, I’ll do it in a second.
December hasn’t even started yet
it is currently November 32nd.
Wrong. It’s October 31st for the 33rd time.
Got the pop up on my desktop, never would have thought about donating without it.
I also donated to 2 projects!
Devs need money, because KDE really needs polish, especially in the security and sandboxing field.
I’m split on this. On one hand of course they need funding, on the other i left windows behind because all their shitty self advertisement so i got a bit irritated by seeing the notification. Of course the notification is easily ignored and if it’s a one time thing is fine but I’m scared it might not be
One notification per year, that can be permanently disabled by the user and by distributions, is worlds apart from Windows’ bullshit
I think it’s about time FOSS points out the fact that making software is a lot of work and while it’s cool if some want to do it for free / as a hobby we need projects to be financially sustainable. Sure its nice if government orgs or companies sponsor open source projects but I feel it would be better if the community™ could pay most of the costs. I know thats utopian but I think most people don’t realise how much work goes into all of these projects and (as evident by that graph) a lot of them seem to be up for paying for a good product that doesn’t spy on you.
I thought it was good to see to be honest. None of this just conjures itself out of thin air, and it’d be worse if they had no other way to get money except sell out to some corporate entity.
Some people don’t even think about donating, not that they don’t want to but it hasn’t even occurred to them.
A gentle reminder on occasion is completely acceptable and uses no dark patterns to get you to donate.
if that’s enough to put you off, then leave
work on desktop linux, esp. outside of gnome, is voluntary, but it costs money. donations are necessary to keep the project living, but most people are unaware kde is not in a great place financially and would be willing to help if they knew. this is just a gentle reminder that donating could make you help an organization that makes software you love
but if you do not care about the financial health of a project that helps you daily and a gentle reminder that takes you away from your blissful unawareness bothers you this much, go away. kde devs don’t owe you anything and you won’t be missed
