from Hacker News

KDE Asking for Donations

by maverick74 on 8/29/24, 11:31 AM with 44 comments

• by hyperman1 on 8/29/24, 1:06 PM

  Great initiative. I've been using KDE for 15 years now. Should have donated ages ago. Feel free to ask again next year ;-)

  As an European, I love how there is an IBAN as possible payment option. I can just give money, no US third parties doing god knows what with your personal data and requiring a credit card.

• by gigatexal on 8/29/24, 1:55 PM

  I support as many open projects as I can. Hell i send the haiku project monthly and I don’t even have a vm with it installed I just had such a good experience with BeOS back in the day I wanted to support the hackers. This i do by IBAN transfer.

  I don’t care if it’s GitHub sponsors or the project’s own page I try donate to open source. Neovim, Linux, etc etc have enriched my life so much that what I donate doesn’t begin to match the value I’ve received.

• by noisy_boy on 8/29/24, 1:34 PM

  Tried to donate using Paypal and got this error:

      Donations to this recipient aren't supported in this country
      Return to K Desktop Environment e.V.
  

  Funny that in this monetization-est period of tech, easily giving money away is still not a solved problem :)

• by mkl on 8/29/24, 12:19 PM

  I use KDE a lot, and have for almost 20 years. I far prefer it to all other desktop environments I've tried. I've never donated though, as I don't remember ever seeing anything asking me to, so I consider this change to be a good thing - very discreet and once-a-year is very different to most such things. I guess I'm not "plugged into these communications channels".

  There are more official break-downs of what donations are used for in the reports on the donations page: https://kde.org/donate/.

  As for Nate's suggestions...

  > extend an offer of full-time employment to our current people, and hire even more!

  Great!

  > I want us to end up with paid QA people and distro developers, and even more software engineers.

  Great!

  > I want us to fund the creation of a next-generation KDE OS

  Um. No thanks? I use KDE because I like it a lot. It's great the way it is! Continuous incremental improvements are much better than a next-generation leap.

• by freedomben on 8/29/24, 2:41 PM

  I guess I'll take the opposing stance.

  I'm torn by this. On the one hand, I see the need for the fundraising, and the points made in TFA about effectiveness are valid. This seems like a good move for KDE.

  But, I worry this sets a terrible precedent in the Linux space. I hate ads, with a passion. I pay for premium versions of stuff (though usually not subscriptions) for an ad-free experience. Once we open the door and say that this type of thing is ok, I worry it's going to start showing up in other FOSS apps. Yes we can patch it out, but I don't want to have to go around patching all the tools to remove their popups!

  I'm probably worrying about nothing, but since nobody else articulated this concern I figured I would.

• by devinprater on 8/29/24, 2:13 PM

  I donate to KDE in the hopes that my $20 per month could help fund accessibility improvements.

• by wkat4242 on 8/29/24, 5:10 PM

  I donate 15€ monthly already. I get a lot of use out of it <3 only issue I have is that it's not always ideal on FreeBSD. But I can't blame them for not prioritising an OS with 0.01% marketshare :)

  Here in Spain that 15 is already a lot so I can't really do more

• by cpburns2009 on 8/29/24, 1:43 PM

  You can also donate through GitHub: https://github.com/sponsors/KDE

• by slightwinder on 8/29/24, 2:19 PM

  > Organizing and hosting larger Akademy events

  Why do they need this? What are they doing there?

  > Funding more and larger sprints

  Why do sprints cost money? Are they paying developers?

• by Am4TIfIsER0ppos on 8/29/24, 1:53 PM

  I'll pay you for the option to have ISO dates in all your programs like existed way back when. And before anyone queries my locale is already correctly set up but all the c++ or qt code chooses to ignore it.

• by TheCraiggers on 8/29/24, 12:57 PM

  I've used KDE for a long time. This isn't the first time I've looked into donating to them. However, it's never been easy. Maybe if I were in the EU, the options offered would be great, but as an american used to just giving a CC number or using a service like Patreon to help manage it, the level of effort was too high. If you want lots of money, lower that bar.

  I just checked again and they now accept Github Sponsors. That is a good start. But I just tried throwing a few bucks their way and was told the minimum monthly donation is $5. Why? Other projects are happy with less than that.

  Again, KDE. Lower. That. Bar. Stop giving people reasons to not donate to you. People going through this process are already doing something unnatural: giving away money for a free product. Stop making them pause and think about if they really want to continue!