Incredible, the last two months absolutely crushed on the first day of December and all it took was a single desktop notification. This is just the paypal donations as well. You can take a look at the data for yourself here.
first thunderbird, now kde. looks like this will become standard practice for free software, which is a good thing. people take for granted the amount of work that goes into tools that help them daily, but i believe that it’s mostly because they think whoever is making the software is fine without their help. this is basically saying “hey! actually, your support would be very helpful to us!”, which is enough to make people want to help
I think the way this should be done is that there should be a service that you pay a fixed amount to monthly, and it tracks how long you use each open source software that month, and splits your money between each of those (and their subprojects) accordingly. Donation credentials could be scraped off Github: tons of repos have a ‘buy me a coffee’ button iirc.
Edit: actually I feel quite tempted to program this now. Just don’t know how to handle the legal liability of being paid money and trusted to redistribute it.
Even just the tracking would be helpful. Track what you use and then a notification each month where you put in how much you want to donate, it tells you how much should go to each thing, and then gives you links to their donate page. I’d love to see my split, even if just to adjust my monthly donations or to see if I’m missing any.
However, a significant number of the services I use are self-hosted websites. Tracking that may be a bit tricky.
There are also other ways to donate https://kde.org/community/donations/others/ not only paypal. Paypal is as free as a zoo animal
It worked on me 🤷. I always have the intention to donate, but life is busy and stressful. If they put a button in front of me that takes me to a donation portal, I’ll do it in a second.
Got the pop up on my desktop, never would have thought about donating without it.
I also donated to 2 projects!
Devs need money, because KDE really needs polish, especially in the security and sandboxing field.
