Some good news coming out from camp KDE, with their yearly fundraiser ongoing and they've managed to smash their original goal.
Writing on Mastodon, KDE developer Carl Schwan mentioned:
I'm so happy to see the big influx of donations to KDE. More than 75 000€ in the last 30 days with 35 000€ in the past 48 hours.
This is huge. Thank you to everyone who donated!
Going by the actual fundraising website, the total is only listed as €34,121 against their original €30,000 goal. But, it seems that's not counting everything. There's also the plain donations to keep an eye on too.
There's more details noted in a fresh blog post from Nate Graham that goes over various other details, like how the new donation request pop-op is clearly working, as it went live on December 1st and this caused donations to surge to where they received "double the prior two months' Paypal donations in a single day".
Thanks to all the donations, KDE e.V. (the non-profit organization that represents the KDE Community), may end up with a balanced budget instead of their predicted "deficit of over €50k in 2024". According to Graham "German nonprofits like KDE e.V. are required to avoid stockpiling money" which is why they run an intentional deficit, so with the funding moving quickly into a positive cashflow they'll end up increasing their expenditure meaning they can hire more people, sponsor more projects and so on.
Really good news, great to see KDE doing well.
Their fundraising website also expanded the list of apps you can "adopt", by donating a specific amount and picking an app you want with a bunch already full but they've recently added more.
For those interested by the numbers and to clarify a bit on how we do the counting, there are two parallel entry points for the donations at the moment:
- The plasma notification: Most people who received the notifications did a one time donation donations with Paypal and their donations are listed here https://kde.org/community/donations/previousdonations/. At the time of the writing this represents ~41k euro. Some people also decided to setup a recurring donation with Donorbox. These are not unfortunately not counted in this 41k, so the numbers are likely a bit higher.
- The end of year campaign (https://kde.org/fundraisers/yearend2024/) : We used Donorbox for that and collected around ~34k euro. This number also includes some large direct bank transfers from people who wanted to donate as part of the end of year compaign while not paying the fees from the donorbox platform.
(This also reminded me to donate to Gnome)
Awesome desktop and apps.
They recently bought a Lenovo Flex notebook/tablet thingy and they demanded my to wipe Windows off it and install Fedora KDE. So I did. With some configuration everything works perfectly.
So that's quite a lot of systems and I happily donate to the team as I clearly can see the improvements with every update. The same counts for Thunderbird BTW.
Oh yeah, my support requests went down with 80% since the switch.
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