Re: donations

faq
flatforty
contribute
subscribe
configure
search
rdf

main
parent
thread

Re: donations
by Bojan on Tuesday 19/Oct/2004, @06:43

How about creating a KDE club (something Mandrake has done with its Mandrakeclub), where one could join for a small annual fee? I use Mandrake and I was very happy when I found out about the possibility to join Mandrakeclub for something like 60$ which can be paid with a credit card - for me that is very small amount of money, considering the quality of software I get with Mandrake Linux. I guess that this could be done with KDE too. Many users that are happy with KDE and can afford it, would join the KDE club for a small annual fee, IMHO.

Related Links

·   Articles on Community and Events
·   Also by Bojan
·   Contact author

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whomever posted them.
( Reply )

Re: donations
by Eric Laffoon on Thursday 21/Oct/2004, @02:30

There's nothing inherently wrong with it but I don't think it's optimal either. There are questions about the value offered to both users and developers. What would the club provide? How would the developers delegate the funds? As a former Mandrake users I think you could say I am one who supports their efforts and this club was an idea to address financial shortcomes for a company. In the pursuit of this they released development packages under the label of "community". One of these contained a CVS snapshot of Quanta where we transitioned the parser and it was a disaster. We had advised CVS testers on our list not to get it. As a result of this decision we saw a pile of reports to our user list and requests for help. In debugging them we finally found that the problem was a non released version and advised everyone to get a new copy. So this effort created additional work for us and tarnished our image with who knows how many users... because they needed to offer something for their side of the contract.

BTW I haven't seen any funding from this, but still happily provide the software. The big problem here was the corporate decision to use the "community" edition. It's a feel good term that is warm and fuzzy, but it should have been called development snapshot, which it was. In fact real community software would imply that the distribution was actually in contact with the community. Unfortunately as a developer I've seen distributions interact with us on releases once from Mandrake from a guy they had to let go in cutbacks and from Debian and Gentoo... community projects.

[ Reply To This | View ]

The Fine Print: The previous comments are owned by whomever posted them.
( Reply )


		"I switch between vi and xemacs quite a lot. I'm happy with both." -- Simon Hausmann
KDE®, "K Desktop Environment", "KDE Dot News", "got the dot?" and the KDE Logo® are trademarks or registered trademarks of KDE e.V. in the European Union, the United States and other countries. All other trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the poster. The rest: Copyright © 2000-2008 KDE e.V. for The KDE Project. For further information or comments on this site, please contact the Webmaster.