In line with the recent, very successful, changes made by KDE to it’s fundraising approach, I would like to suggest that additional changes be implemented for managing the sponsorship of the development of specific features.
Governments and enterprise partners are already able to fund the development of specific features, with the Sovereign Tech Fund investing €1 million being the most recent example.
However, as far as I am aware, there are no straight-forward means by which regular members of the community can actually do the same thing; it appears our options are limited to either sponsoring the KDE organisation as a whole or sponsoring a specific KDE application, although with significant limitations.
With no official procedure and platform for managing sponsorships and payouts I doubt contributors, many of whom are contributing without pay, are being provided with the kind of financial security they need to comfortably take time away from their paying job and personal life to work on a requested feature.
This gap is clearly visible in issues like the per-screen virtual desktops feature request, and the associated 21 year old bug report, which garnered thousands of dollars/euros of ad-hoc bounties. I can only guess at how much longer this feature request took to complete due to the lack of an official sponsorship platform, but I think it is reasonable to say that it may have been considerable.
This situation unfortunately relegates regular community members to a kind of second class citizenship when compared to state and corporate actors, which I think everyone can agree is not ideal.
I am agnostic about how the solution is implemented, so long as community members have more options to financially contribute to the development of specific features, and contributors are provided with more financial security when working on such features.
I think an official platform and procedure for approving sponsorships, securing donations and paying out contributors would provide the following benefits:
- It will provide contributors with more financial security when developing features that the community has interest in sponsoring.
- It will put regular community members on an equal footing with state and corporate actors.
- It will facilitate development that would not occur simply because contributors lack the funding to allocate their time to the project.
- Procedures for reviewing and approving the sponsorships could ensure that features conform to the vision and principles of KDE.