Interview on Tech Over Tea about fundraising, money, and design

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I recently sat down with Brodie Robertson again to appear on his Tech Over Tea show, this time on the subject of KDE’s recent fundraising, the role of money in open-source in general, and also design (I can never resist talking about this). If these topics interest you, check it out!

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://pointieststick.com/2025/01/11/interview-on-tech-over-tea-about-fundraising-money-and-design/
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One point that stuck out to me - in part because of my part-time job for my wife’s small business accounting firm - is the way Nate framed the difficulty of sponsoring work with “pizza money”.

It’s easy to forget that, on top of the whole “it’s less motivating when a hobby becomes a job” factor, a purely volunteer developer would bear non-negligible administrative costs to accept sponsored work. In the United States, for example, once a normally volunteer developer accepts money for the work, they are then technically an independent contractor and have:

  • More personal records to keep and more tax forms to file - this would be considered business income, so there’s a form to file for that, there’s a separate form if applicable for foreign income - all usually with a higher tax prep cost
  • A higher tax rate (“self-employment tax”) on the independently-earned money
  • A need to think about things like business insurance as a just-in-case protection

Another really notable point for me, given the recent call for testing for Plasma 6.3, was this section - the number of combinations of hardware out there, multiplied by the number of combinations of settings offered by KDE products, ends up meaning that folks with niche needs or uncommon settings need to either participate in testing up front, be willing to contribute to development themselves, or be willing to work around issues that arise because of those settings.

The kicker there, I think, is the human tendency to believe that your personal priorities and preferences are widely shared, and that your needs are going to be obvious and widely understood. A bit of patience, and a willingness to approach things as not a consumer, but a contributing member of a free and open source software community, helps a lot in having a positive experience :slight_smile:

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