Hi All,

On Mon, Aug 20, 2018 at 1:29 PM Adriaan de Groot <groot@kde.org> wrote:

Mostly I'm repeating this item from Cornelius because it follows so well from
what Valorie *originally* asked, rather than a bunch of misintepretations and
discussing-something-else.

On Monday, 20 August 2018 10:58:05 CEST Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
> I don't think that anybody has a problem with having a healthy ecosystem of
> companies around KDE. That's not the debate we are having.

The thread started with Valorie exclaiming surprise that there was pushback on
the entire notion of having companies / paid development around the KDE
community. Some people have chimed in saying that that's not what they hear at
all, so at this point I'm inclined to say that Valorie had the bad luck to run
into one or two grumpy people.

[Disclosure: Cornelius is presumably paid to work on Free Software-ish things
throughout the week; I am paid to work on Free Software things for at least
half of the week, and am looking for more.]

I also work on Free Software-ish things myself, but haven't done as much KDE stuff

in the past few years.

But we could run a separate email thread with this question:

- do we (as a community) want an ecosystem of companies and paid development
around KDE?

I would argue that whether we as a community want that or not we already have it. I can

name on a couple of hands quickly a number of community members that either are paid

to work directly on KDE stuff or on free software in general and do KDE stuff in "Community"

paid time by the company they work for.

> > For those people who claim that having paid people work on a Free Software
> > project will inevitably kill all motivation for volunteers, let's look at
>
> > some examples within or close to KDE:
> We need to get clear on what we are debating. It's not that paid people are
> a problem. It's about how this is done and who is paying them.
>
> We have a very conscious standing decision that KDE e.V. does not pay
> developers. This clearly separates paid and volunteer work there so that
> there can be no issue with harming volunteer motivation. We might want to
> revisit this decision but would need to be very clear about the governance
> of this work.

You're right. That's a very separate debate. That question is:

- are there any circumstances under which KDE e.V. itself should fund
development, by paying developers directly or hiring companies to do so?

Yes, I think this is the real question here. We already have paid developers, the question

is whether e.V. should get involved in that aspect.

One possible way to remove the emotional aspect of this would be to have the board

or some work group come up with a bounty list of long-standing issues we would like to see

fixed and whoever (individual or group/company) is able to properly fix the issue gets the

money for that bounty. This could be tricky for board members to stay out of the conflict

of interest gray area. (e.g. Hey, Lydia created that bounty because she knew the company/

friends she works for/with could tackle it or somesuch) but with enough of a selection process

of which bounties we want that could be decreased quite a bit (e.g. The whole kde ev membership

voted on these bounties, no way for an individual to have influenced the bounties enough to matter).

BR,

Jeremy

.. and there's a third question, raised by yourself at Akademy and touched by
Sven just now:

- if KDE e.V. has money, and doesn't spend it directly on development, how
can it best support KDE development indirectly?

These are three distinct questions, and really we should be very very clear on
which one we're tackling (which, thank you, you have pointed out -- as has
Sune, and others, and now I'm just repeating stuff :) )

[ade]