Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund Backs KDE with €1.3M

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund Backs KDE with €1.3M(theregister.com)

125 points by Lihh27 3 days ago | 18 comments

eigenspace 3 days ago |

Its really cool seeing KDE make so much progress, and mature into such a big, robust umbrella organization that helps so many smaller open source projects. They're a real jewel of the Open Souce ecosystem.

Germany gets a lot of shit for things they do poorly, but should be proud of both KDE, and the Sovereign Tech Fund.

I also think it's worth reflecting on just how much stuff KDE gets done with so little money. I dropped them 50€ yesterday, and would encourage people to do the same: https://kde.org/community/donations/previousdonations/

shevy-java 3 days ago | |

Funding is nice, though ... why so much into KDE? Not other projects?

I think KDE was better in the past. With its "wayland-only" future it will leave behind several linux users.

> I also think it's worth reflecting on just how much stuff KDE gets done with so little money. I dropped them 50€ yesterday, and would encourage people to do the same

So the donation daemon worked. Though, if they now have so much money, why would you recommend more money to KDE and not other projects? Why not xserver https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver or gtk2-ng https://git.devuan.org/Daemonratte/gtk2-ng? Granted, these have fewer users, but there should be more diversity among those receiving funding.

I also donate a small part of my monthly income, but I don't feel a need to say where to or nudge others to do the same. It would not make any difference to me personally if Joe donates to abc or xyz.

unethical_ban 3 days ago | | |

I don't think there is as much utility in funding projects designed to keep past protocols alive, rather than funding those that have many millions of users.

aruggirello 3 days ago | | |

> With its "wayland-only" future it will leave behind several linux users.

This is so sad. Something like this already happened two decades ago - when GNOME 3 arrived, and KDE 4 - rough times, things broke and I had to do some distro (and DE) hopping - before settling again. Whenever you start to see a project mature and stable enough in Linux land, maybe even starts to gain unexpected traction, soon somebody decides it's time to "move fast and break things".

I sincerely hope KDE reconsiders X11 support; IIRC they proposed to keep it if the community showed still enough interest. Of course maintaining a dual stack requires double the effort, but if funding comes in, come on, maybe there's enough resources to keep X11 support alive - if feature freezed - a couple years more. There's still a few rough edges around Wayland that prevent me and others to switch.

cyanydeez 3 days ago |

So, it's nice to see governments realizing the software is a public good and likely needs to be treated as such, including, inevitably, as a utility. Open source is a seemingly ideal foundation for a democracy to adopt. Commercial, private code, then is the other side of the fence and needs to be tightly controlled and regulated the same way Russia, China, North Korea, etc are seen in political spheres.

spwa4 2 days ago |

So when Germany says they want to switch to open source what they mean is "if you deliver software that takes 30 years of work by about 2000 software developers, we consider that worth 1.3 million euros.

In case anyone wants to know: that's about 2 euros per developer per month.

graynk 2 days ago | |

ya just can't win with some people

spwa4 1 day ago | | |

You want the calculation of how much the US government paid for silicon valley? I assure you it's still not that much per month per person, not even minimum wage, but 3 orders of magnitude more than this.

jl6 3 days ago |

> The names Sécurix and Bureautix are nods to the famous indomitable Gauls Astérix and Obélix

Incoming retcon of Unix…

joe_mamba 3 days ago |

Let's fucking gooo!

KDE has been the most used DE in the Arch space since 2019 and kept growing, totally deserved BTW.

https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun/Desktop%20Environments/his...

shevy-java 3 days ago |

Will Nate finally abandon his donate-now daemon or not?

pjmlp 3 days ago |

Now this is interesting, because moving away from foreign cloud vendors hardly helps if everything else stays the same.

Maybe some Jolla sponsoring as well?

goobatrooba 3 days ago | |

I honestly don't know why there is so much Jolla love here. I backed their tablet Kickstarter project early on and never got a product. Only a series of "it will take a bit longer" emails that got more spaced out and then stopped altogether. And then they made very strange deals for russian support/carriers/... I can forgive losing money but I feel they just strung us along. And then the jolla-russia link is just scary and I struggle to believe this has been fully resolved and all their liquidity problems (which drove them initially to Russia) are gone?

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/01/jolla-cut-ties-russia/

https://jolla.com/content/uploads/2023/11/Former_leadership_...

All very confusing.. this summary captures it well. But then the company also wants to run the AI route..

> Jolla's return to the smartphone market follows a turbulent decade during which the company nearly collapsed, pivoted to licensing its Sailfish OS platform, severed business ties with Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, and later reorganized under the new corporate structure Jollyboys. The reset produced a device assembled in Salo, Finland that combines mid-range mobile silicon, a Linux-based operating system with optional Android app compatibility, and a modular back cover system designed to encourage hardware customization.

...

> Jolla is also developing Mind2, a compact AI computing device intended to function as a privacy-preserving personal assistant that operates primarily on local hardware. Rather than transmitting email, calendar, or document data to remote servers, the system is designed to ingest personal information locally and answer queries directly on the device.

https://www.techspot.com/news/111540-jolla-sailfish-pitches-...

cenobyte 3 days ago |

So they have money to throw away? because there is no path to profit....

eigenspace 3 days ago | |

KDE is a common good. This is like saying there's no path to profit for building roads or sewers. It's an enabler of profit and development.

Apocryphon 3 days ago | | |

Digital infra...

adjejmxbdjdn 3 days ago | |

If this allows them to replace even 10k Windows computers with Linux it would lay fr itself in months.