Bug 500398

Summary:	How come KDE e.V. never asked for a donation / grant from Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund (STF)?
Product:	[I don't know] kde	Reporter:	John <ilikefoss>
Component:	general	Assignee:	Unassigned bugs <unassigned-bugs-null>
Status:	RESOLVED NOT A BUG
Severity:	normal	CC:	kdedev, nate
Priority:	NOR
Version First Reported In:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Other
OS:	Other
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description John 2025-02-19 12:21:56 UTC

SUMMARY
How come KDE never asked for a donation / grant from Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund (STF)?
This is very strange, considering that now every KDE website, blog or blog post always asks for donations.
So much that now there's even a reminder built into the code for it, once a year if I remember well.

Why is it accepted that we are nagged and annoyed on every website, page, blog post and even in Plasma itself to donate, but if some institution gives away free donations, and considerable donations, much much more that what we the users can do, the money re not requested / taken?

GNOME for example got €1M to help advance work On systemd-homed Home encryption, which is awesome!
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-This-Week-Homed

Eclipse Foundation just got €515K which is great too!
https://www.phoronix.com/news/STA-Invests-In-Eclipse

And so many other projects have got more than €100K!

In the past 2 years this institution donated more than €23 million to open source projects:
https://www.phoronix.com/news/STF-Two-Years-24.9M-USD

Why or how come KDE e.V. is never asking for money too like Gnome and others did?
What is going on?

This is even more strange considering that both the institution and the non-profit organization are based in Germany.
Which mean that people can even speak in German to better understand each other, laws are the same, banks could be the same, etc.

If there's a problem with the non-profit organization type of thing, then find a way!
Or ask them to donate something else than money, that can produce money.
Or hardware, like 4K laptops, desktop, TVs, OLED screens, power meters, colorimeters, etc.

It's so sad and annoying to see so many projects getting consistent donations and KDE that has lots of projects, some quite big and demanding, none!
And at the same KDE asking us to donate with every occasion!

Please ask this institution for a donation or at least give us an explanation why you didn't!
Or why they refused!

Thank you!

Comment 1 TraceyC 2025-02-19 18:33:32 UTC

Hello! You've reached the KDE bug tracker, which is for tracking bugs in KDE software. Unfortunately here on the bug tracker, we cannot offer help with donation / e.V. topics not clearly related to bugs in KDE software. 

You can find appropriate ways to get in touch with the e.V. at https://ev.kde.org/contact/

Thanks for your understanding

Comment 2 Nate Graham 2025-02-19 19:36:33 UTC

It's a valid question for a complicated topic, but indeed, a bug report isn't really the right place to ask it. If you want a public discussion, I'd recommend asking on the kde-community@kde.org mailing list (make sure to subscribe so you receive responses) or else https://discuss.kde.org. If you want the question answered privately, you can email the KDE e.V. board using the email address found at the link Tracey provided.