Graham: Asking for donations in Plasma

[Posted August 29, 2024 by jzb]

The KDE project plans to directly ask for donations in the Plasma desktop starting with version 6.2. According to this blog post by Nate Graham, users will see a system notification once per year (in December) asking for a donation to the non-profit KDE e.V.:

Now, I know that messages like this can be controversial! The change was carefully considered, and we tried our best to minimize the annoying-ness factor: It's small and unobtrusive, and no matter what you do with it (click any button, close it, etc) it'll go away until next year. It's implemented as a KDE Daemon (KDED) module, which allows users and distributors to permanently disable it if they like.

Tactful

Posted Aug 29, 2024 20:38 UTC (Thu) by lynxlynxlynx (guest, #90121) [Link]

I for one like this change; the need for non-profit (like KDE e.v.) funding to drive FOSS forward is ever clear, but this implementation is tasteful, very limited in scope and honest. Exactly the sort of thing I expect from a free software project.

I know this isn't their full fundraising strategy, but just to illustrate a different approach. One of our local branches of a very well known international charity spends most of its budget on fundraising, stuck in a sort of a loop, where they can never maximize their spending on impact itself. Going hard into in-your-face fundraising can lead to such traps, so gentle nudges like the one here should be encouraged.

the infiltration of ads into human existence is now complete

Posted Aug 29, 2024 21:49 UTC (Thu) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733) [Link]

Resistance is futile.

Plasma donations?!

Posted Aug 30, 2024 1:25 UTC (Fri) by bersl2 (guest, #34928) [Link]

Hell no, I hate needles!

free software finance practices

Posted Aug 30, 2024 3:52 UTC (Fri) by shironeko (subscriber, #159952) [Link] (8 responses)

It feels like in the past year or so lots of projects I've used have started to experiment with ways to raise funds and there's really a sense that everyone is not quite sure how to do it.
Kinda like licensing or accessibility, it's not something that come naturally by just learning how to code. So it would be great if fundraising and free software finances in general can be a topic that gets more coverage.

free software finance practices

Posted Aug 30, 2024 7:49 UTC (Fri) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

It might be nice if there were more specialized projects covering this for other projects, I mean not the finances but the "show the users which of the projects they are using need funding and how you can financially support them" part the way some package managers do.

free software finance practices

Posted Aug 30, 2024 11:40 UTC (Fri) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (6 responses)

I'd really like a site which collected information about how to donate to various projects. What I'd like to do is make a list of the top-50 programs I use, and donate a bit to all of them. But for each individual project you first have to figure out how they take donations. If it's the other side of the pond it gets even more complicated.

It would have to be a trustworthy site, because you're basically giving people bank account numbers to send money to. That's hard.

What would be really nice is a Donatomatic where I could provide a list of projects with weights and then it generates a single invoice I can send to finance and when they pay automatically distributes money across all the selected projects. It would mean I'd only have to fight the battle once, instead of for each project.

free software finance practices

Posted Aug 30, 2024 12:47 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (2 responses)

Many charities use PayPal, and it solves those payment problems. It does take a cut of every transaction, though.

free software finance practices

Posted Aug 30, 2024 13:12 UTC (Fri) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link]

>Many charities use PayPal, and it solves those payment problems. It does take a cut of every transaction, though.

This depends on your location. From a European perspective, PayPal is that "weird American thing", and the easiest way within the EU is to pay by direct bank transfer, just like we pay our bills on a daily basis.

free software finance practices

Posted Aug 30, 2024 15:55 UTC (Fri) by yeltsin (guest, #171611) [Link]

For many of us, it also forces a conversion rate that is just terrible compared to what our banks offer. Last time I checked, it resulted in 10-15% markup for payments in USD, on top of PayPal's own fees. It used to be possible to turn that off and rely on your bank to do the currency conversion, but they removed that a couple of years ago because it makes them more money. Thankfully, it's pretty easy to avoid PayPal these days.

free software finance practices

Posted Aug 30, 2024 12:58 UTC (Fri) by shironeko (subscriber, #159952) [Link] (1 responses)

yeah, I'm not quite sure why this is, but all the dotation platforms we have right now seem to want to make a transaction for each individual donation, rather than taking out the donation on the same day for everyone you donate to in one transaction, it just seem like throwing money away.

free software finance practices

Posted Aug 30, 2024 13:29 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> yeah, I'm not quite sure why this is, but all the dotation platforms we have right now seem to want to make a transaction for each individual donation, rather than taking out the donation on the same day for everyone you donate to in one transaction,

Because:

1) the more transactions they make, they more fees they can skim.
2) If they add everything up and do it at once, you'll know exactly how much you're spending and might take steps to reduce it.
3) Different billing/donation periods (weekly, monthly, yearly) are a legit thing.

> it just seem like throwing money away.

...Not from the platforms' perspective!

JWZ wrote a series of relevent posts describing his experiences with Patreon:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/06/patreon-api/
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/08/patreon-is-lying-to-you-...
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/08/patreon-screws-me-over-s...

free software finance practices

Posted Sep 3, 2024 13:36 UTC (Tue) by ber (subscriber, #2142) [Link]

Yes, it would be cool to have a service that can pay several Free Software initiatives at once.

Until then we at Intevation find that the following platforms allow us to pay for several Free Software products:

* https://liberapay.com/IntevationGmbH/
* https://opencollective.com/intevation-gmbh#section-recurr...
* https://github.com/orgs/Intevation/sponsoring

(in addition to Patreon, other more general payment services in addition to bank transfers in the EU).

If you are interested in more details why to pay for Free Software, I did a talk (in German) at Froscon two weeks ago: https://freiburg.social/@fundevogel/112982022582037497

Ugh

Posted Aug 30, 2024 11:19 UTC (Fri) by Deleted user 129183 (guest, #129183) [Link]

I do not like this idea at all, but good that it can be permanently disabled even before you see the nag screen for the first time.

nagware

Posted Sep 2, 2024 17:23 UTC (Mon) by mcon147 (subscriber, #56569) [Link] (1 responses)

I worry that this will encourage other projects to beg in annoying ways, leading to no-nag forks

nagware

Posted Sep 5, 2024 3:47 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

It's not annoying if I do want to support the projects I use and the request goes away if asked to. Thunderbird apparently uses this method to be self sustaining