KDE Plasma: Donation appeals on the desktop in the future
The KDE project lives from donations. The upcoming Plasma 6.2 desktop will display a call for donations once a year.
The KDE desktop will ask you to use Sepnden in the future.
(Image: Nate Graham)
Programmer Nate Graham has declared that the KDE Plasma desktop will in future display appeals for donations. The change will come into effect with Plasma 6.2.
In his blog, KDE developer Graham explains that the KDE project is becoming more successful and therefore more popular. The increasing number of users is also accompanied by rising costs. As examples, he mentions web and server hosting, organizing and hosting larger academy events, funding more and larger sprints, paying people to work on things that the volunteer community is not focused on and their longer-term commitment.
Risk of "dying by success"
Graham goes on to discuss that the KDE project risks dying from success if more money is not raised as the software becomes more popular. However, he explicitly emphasizes that the KDE developers "give all this stuff away for free, no strings attached!" Nobody has to pay a cent unless they want to or can.
However, those who follow KDE on social media see frequent appeals for donations. Graham ends his weekly blog posts with this. The official KDE social channels also "blast them out constantly", and there are also annual fundraising events that are heavily advertised online. If you read them all, you probably get the impression that KDE is begging for money. However, those who do not follow these communication channels may never see an appeal for donations. Experience has shown that the number of people who subscribe to such channels is small. There is therefore a large number of people who do not know that they can donate to KDE at all, and even more so that donations are critically important for its continued existence.
Appeal once a year
Once a year, starting with the Plasma 6.2 release, the KDE project will now display a system notification asking for a donation. The idea is to get the message that KDE really needs the financial help of its users in front of more people. Especially those who have not been aware of KDE's public advertising efforts.
The KDE developers are aware that this can be controversial news. Therefore, according to their own statements, they have carefully considered how to minimize the annoyance factor. The dialog is small and unobtrusive, and no matter what users do with it, it will disappear by next year. It is implemented as a KDE daemon so that users and distributions can disable it permanently. The dialog can also be configured in the system settings under notifications.
According to Graham, the decision was made after the developers looked at two factors: firstly, other open-source projects such as Thunderbird and Wikipedia, which implement similar things. In both cases, appeals for donations did not drive users away, but resulted in a massive increase in donations. And secondly, KDE really needs something like this to grow its finances sustainably with its user base. In his blog post, Graham goes into further detail on a few expected counter-arguments.
The reactions of the community to the blog post are largely positive. Especially regarding Windows, for example, which stuffs advertisements into the start menu, some see this as an absolutely justifiable solution. Others, however, argue that Linux distributions, for example, should contribute financially to the KDE project.
In June, the KDE developers released the Plasma 6.1 desktop. This brought significant improvements with new functions that also work under Wayland. The use of the remote desktop has also been simplified.
(dmk)