Thursday, 29 August 2024 | Nate Graham
Why do we ask for donations so often? Because it’s important! As KDE becomes more successful and an increasing number of people use our software, our costs grow as well:
- Web and server hosting
- Organizing and hosting larger Akademy events
- Funding more and larger sprints
- Paying people to work on stuff the volunteer community doesn’t focus on, and retaining them over time
And so on. If we don’t raise more money while our software becomes more popular, we risk “dying of success,” so to speak. Remember, we give all this stuff away for free, no strings attached! Nobody has to pay a cent if they don’t want to or can’t afford to.
Accordingly, if you’re plugged into KDE social media, you probably see a lot of requests for donations. I end every one of my “This Week in KDE” posts with one, and many others do for their own blog posts as well. KDE’s official social media channels blast it out constantly, and we also do yearly fundraisers that are widely promoted online. If you’re reading this, you may get the impression that we’re always begging for cash!
But if you’re not plugged into these communications channels, you might not have ever seen a donation request at all. We know that the fraction of people who subscribe to these channels is small, so there’s a huge number of people who may not even know they can donate to KDE, let alone that donations are critically important to its continued existence.
Starting in Plasma 6.2, that changes, and I’d like to introduce what it will look like! From 6.2 onwards, Plasma itself will show a system notification asking for a donation once per year, in December:
The idea here is to get the message that KDE really does need your financial help in front of more eyeballs — especially eyeballs not currently looking at KDE’s public-facing promotion efforts.
Now, I know that messages like this can be controversial! The change was carefully considered, and we tried our best to minimize the annoying-ness factor: It’s small and unobtrusive, and no matter what you do with it (click any button, close it, etc) it’ll go away until next year. It’s implemented as a KDE Daemon (KDED) module, which allows users and distributors to permanently disable it if they like. You can also disable just the popup on System Settings’ Notifications page, accessible from the configure button in the notification’s header.
Ultimately the decision to do this came down to the following factors:
- We looked at FOSS peers like Thunderbird and Wikipedia which have similar things (and in Wikipedia’s case, the message is vastly more intrusive and naggy). In both cases, it didn’t drive everyone away and instead instead resulted in a massive increase in donations that the projects have been able to use to employ lots of people.
- KDE really needs something like this to help our finances grow sustainably in line with our userbase and adoption by vendors and distributors.
So now let me address what I anticipate will be some common concerns:
I think you’re wrong; people hate pop-ups and this is going to turn them off!
Like I said, peer organizations didn’t see that happen, and some were even more in-your-face about it. I do suspect a small but vocal crowd of people will spread doom and gloom about it on social media anyway, of course. This also happened when we implemented off-by-default telemetry — which by the way, was implemented so conservatively that it barely collects any information of value at all. It’s a cautionary tale about the danger of being too timid and ending up with the worst of both worlds.
The worst-case scenario is that we don’t get more donations from this after a couple of years, and end up removing it. That’s always an option. But I think it’s worth venturing out there and being a bit bold! With risk comes opportunity.
KDE shouldn’t need to pay people directly; employment should come from vendors and distributors shipping our software!
To a certain extent this already does happen: by far the largest contributor of paid work is Blue Systems — mostly funded by Valve Corporation, which ships KDE software on the Steam Deck. There are also trickles and spurts of sponsored work from distros, KDAB, and enterprising folks who get funded via grants.
Ultimately a healthy economic ecosystem around KDE includes people employed by many parties, including KDE itself, in my opinion. This is how KDE can help control its own destiny. And that costs money! Money that needs to come from somewhere.
Why does it have to be a notification pop-up? Put this in Welcome Center or something!
We had a request for donations in Welcome center for several years, and it didn’t make a difference, because right after you’ve installed the system wasn’t the right time to ask. At that point, you don’t know if you like Plasma yet, so asking for money is premature.
If KDE is as successful as Thunderbird and Wikipedia have been, what are you going to do with all that money?
This is a question the KDE e.V. board of directors as a whole would need to answer, and any decision on it will be made collectively.
But as one of the five members on that board, I can tell you my personal answer and the one that as your representative, I’d advocate for. It’s basically the platform I ran on two years ago: extend an offer of full-time employment to our current people, and hire even more! I want us to end up with paid QA people and distro developers, and even more software engineers. I want us to fund the creation of a next-generation KDE OS we can offer directly to institutions looking to switch to Linux, and a hardware certification program to go along with it. I want us to to extend our promotional activities and outreach to other major distros and vendors and pitch our software to them directly. I want to see Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop ship Plasma by default. I want us to use this money to take over the world — with freedom, empowerment, and kindness.
These have been dreams for a long time, and throughout KDE we’ve been slowly moving towards them over the years. With a lot more money, we can turbocharge the pace! If that stuff sounds good, you can start with a donation today. 
I know talking about money can be awkward. But failure to plan is planning to fail; money is something we can’t ignore and just hope things work out — and we don’t. Raising more money is a part of that plan, and this new yearly donation notification is a part of raising money. It’s my expectation and hope that asking our users for donations will result in more donations, and that we can use these to accelerate KDE’s reach and the quality of our software!
