KDE Developer: Why Plasma 6.2 Includes a Once-a-Year Popup for Donations

'If you're plugged into KDE social media, you probably see a lot of requests for donations...' writes KDE developer Nate Graham on his personal blog. But '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...'

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... [W]e 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.

The blog post also answers the question: 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.


A reaction from GamingOnLinux:
I think it is fair for KDE to expose that they need funding and asking that from inside the UI would not hurt for a software that delivered so much for free (as in freedom and as in 'gratis').
Linux magazine points out that other new features for 6.2 'include the ability to block apps from inhibiting sleep mode, a new 'fill' mode for wallpaper, an overhauled System Settings Accessibility page, and the usual slew of bug fixes.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.