Related to a previous post about Thunderbird collecting 6.4 million dollars in 2022 and KDE only 200k, I’m wondering why people do not donate or do not donate more to KDE.
What’s holding you back?
Here’s what I said in that thread
I donate periodically to KDE, but my major gripe is that I don’t know where the money is going. They have no financial reports that can be easily found, individual projects don’t have a donation button, there’s no public tracking of their income or expenditure like on opencollective, and it’s not easy to find KDE devs (aka who is actually on the KDE team) so that one could sponsor individual devs.
Although I trust KDE more than Mozilla (MZ pays their CEO 7 million/year and invests in anything but Firefox, their most known project), I would much much much rather prefer it to know where the money goes.
I think the reason Thunderbird got so much is because of it’s Windows based users. KDE really only has Linux based users, which is nowhere near the same amount of people.
Krita has far more Windows users than Linux users, so does GCompris, and very probably Kdenlive too, to mention 3 of the bigger (in terms of userbase) KDE products. Many more KDE app projects are currently compiling their products for several OSes (Linux, Windows, macOS, Android and iOS)
And all of them combined have fewer users than Firefox and Thunderbird which both nag people to donate.
With exceptions like Krita, Windows support is second tier for most (things like weird icon sizes and window positions) and even for applications that support Windows well, there is little interest in promoting the Windows version, even though there’s a decent chance this would improve the developer pool. I’m fairly convinced that had Windows support been a bigger priority, the KOffice/Calligra would have had a chance to survive against OpenOffice/LibreOffice, especially considering that it could have worked with Kontact the way MS Office has Outlook. Kontact even had reasonably good Windows support before the move to the whole Akonadi thing.
I was only arguing this point. Apologies for not making that clear.