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.
Yes, except none of those are the most convenient payment method for online purchases in my country, even credit card requires an international one IIRC, furthermore, it is a pain to figure out a proper amount cause it uses Euro. The minimum € 3,00 isn’t a huge amount converted to my local currency, but it isn’t a small amount either.
So you end up with something that is too much of a hasle even if you had the cash and wanted to donate. Cause you can’t stop thinking along the lines of “even if I wanted to deal with all of this the amount I’m giving isn’t going to change that much”
That’s okay, though. Donating is purely a voluntary thing. No-one at KDE is into pressuring or guilting anybody into doing anything. You enjoy our software and it helps you study, work or have fun? We are happy and good with that. Have fun!
It’s more of a frustration thing rather than guilty, mostly because it is possible, but not convenient. KDE isn’t the only thing I’d like to donate to, but it also uses PayPal
Again: we do not use only PayPal. We have implemented many other methods.
Oof, my bad, posted the message without completing it. I was gonna say that PayPal is a bad payment method cause it doesn’t take into account the intricacies of local payment methods despite being used as an sort of international method to transfer money (The play store is a fantastic payment method for instance, almost makes me wish for Google to take on PayPal). Credit Cards are also bad cause you need an international one and it isn’t always easy to get it.