KDE operated at a loss in 2023
Posted by Littux@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 72 comments
KDE during 2023 took in 349,332.65 EUR while their expenses totaled 457,071.31 EUR. Most of the KDE income is from KDE patrons / corporate sponsorships and supporting members and donations. While they took in 349k EUR last year, on personnel costs alone they spent 317k EUR in 2023, another 43k on the Akademy conference, 12k on springs, 20k on other events, 22k on taxes/insurance, and 17k on infrastructure.
KDE in 2022 saw 285,495.97 EUR in income while spending 384,604.78. Back in 2021 meanwhile KDE saw 238,929.67 EUR in income while spending just 218,396.75 EUR.
I think this is the reason why KDE has started asking for donations
ChastisingChihuahua@reddit
I was going to donate into until it required me to give them an address and phone number. I was willing to give them money if they didn't ask me for so much information.
d_ed@reddit
It was intended to run at a loss this year.
We had loads of money from donations that wasn't spent on travel during the pandemic. This has been the case for a few years, we're a non profit, we're not allowed to have huge surpluses in the bank by eV laws.
Now we are deliberately over spending with developer hires, we will long term have to build donations to sustain that new level but it's not a problematic situation.
Jimlee1471@reddit
Yeah, I think that people tend to forget that KDE is indeed a non-profit organization. The article's title seems like clickbait.
thelastcubscout@reddit
Even in the EU I thought I heard that NPOs are allowed to keep a reasonable surplus in reserve though.
Like 1-2 years worth of expenses as a rational contingency strategy.
Not so?
b4k4ni@reddit
Can only speak for Germany ... You are allowed small savings or saving for specific projects. Like we have a bus we need for the football players to go around (and other parts of the club). We already save for a new one, because ours is like 25 years old already and it's showing.
And the small part really means small. You need to spend, or you might lose the NPO status.
thelastcubscout@reddit
Too bad that exact amount isn't available as a one-liner!
From a quick search, Deutsche Umwelthilfe had a surplus of approximately 155,864 € at the end of 2022, up by some 30+K euro from the previous year. So. What other factors are taken into account? I wonder.
b4k4ni@reddit
They have 12000 members and 113 paid workers. They "made" 16 million last year or so and that money is mostly spent. They also need to pay taxes on everything that is not part of the NGO part. Like if they sell merchandise, it's part of an economic part of the NGO, so they pay regular taxes for it.
The non-profit part allows them to give donation receipts to donors etc. And are tax exempt in some parts.
If you really question this, let's talk about the ADAC...
merb@reddit
They probably pay taxes which you only need to do if you have too big of a surplus as an ngo
mrlinkwii@reddit
most EU countries allow that
CrazyKilla15@reddit
What? It's absolutely insane that its illegal to have basic good management practices, what.
Like what do you mean you're legally required to Spend NOW NOW NOW, legally required to be ineffective, wasteful, and constantly needing donations??? Required to overspend? Illegal to have a reasonable buffer for slow donation periods. Like what?!
Whats the plan to avoid mass layoffs? What if donations dont reach or sustain the level you hope? Infinite growth in donations is obviously unrealistic?
Like to be clear its one thing to decide this is a good use of surplus money and can promote the KDE project, thats all well and good, but to be required to burn money just to make number go down????
(talking in general not about KDE specifically here) No wonder the non-profit industrial complex is such a grift if its literally illegal in some jurisdictions to be well-managed and not waste money, to save it and use it where its useful and most effective. And what better way to bleed money than with personnel and admin costs, incentivizing the exact kind of people that you dont want to get in on the personally profitable action. Its not profit to pay ourselves a lot of money, but is to save it???? like what.
_AACO@reddit
It's to prevent non profits from becoming cash stores for the owners. They're allowed to have a safety net just not a very big one.
dobbelj@reddit
I want a source for this claim or for the original claim that there's some sort of limit. Because other charitable non-profits(Red Cross comes to mind) has a lot of money in the bank, and I could not find anything using google that indicates there's a limit to what they can hold. There are recommendations that a non-profit should have enough for 3-6 months in the bank, but perpetuating the myth that non-profits can't have funds available is damaging to other non-profits that are run responsibly.
_AACO@reddit
Heavily summarizing all of that: too much cash will make governments assume you're laundering money or are a bunch of terrorists. Even if you aren't any of those, they might strip your status because you're hoarding money instead of using it for your mission.
To provide you the actual laws that KDE has to abide, I'd need to be a much better German speaker.
Neither d_ed nor me said anything of the sort.
CrazyKilla15@reddit
thats so obviouly designed to hurt non-profits and their mission its ridiculous that anyone accepts and especially argues in favor of it. "Terrorism and money laundering are when a heavily regulated non-profit with strict rules on how and where they can spend money, has savings. this is a very sane and reasonable argument from the government." like do you hear yourselves.
they already have to know where their money came from, have a paper trail! they already cant spend it on whatever! so far no legitimate reason has been given for this arbitrary savings limit. the government does not, in fact, know better than individual non-profits on when best their money can be used to effectively serve their mission in an otherwise legally compliant way.
_AACO@reddit
It isn't, unfortunately might NPOs have been used in the past for nefarious reasons.
No because no one in this chain of comments came even close to saying anything of the sort.
Not always, I don't know if KDE can accept them, but anonymous donations are possible.
On that we are in agreement
CrazyKilla15@reddit
"Heavily summarizing all of that: too much cash will make governments assume you're laundering money or are a bunch of terrorists."
theres no point in responding further to your bad faith trolling.
Enthusedchameleon@reddit
You put words in the mouth of the other commenter. When the following comment says that no one said what your strawman said you accuse them of being bad faith?
The guy was summarizing what the links said, not holding the position of "this is a sane and reasonable argument from the government".
And just in case you forgot or didn't read, the comment sourcing the links and summarizing what they said was responding to a comment asking for sources - NOT for people to DEFEND the position, but to prove that there are limits, as they did not believe there were.
Now stop being bad faith yourself.
CrazyKilla15@reddit
I did not put words in anyones mouth. I said the situation and the governments argument is absurd, and people are in fact here defending it and mass-downvoting any comments pointing out how ridiculous it is!
Thats.. thats you. Thats you putting words in their mouth. i never said they did. I didnt even reply to that guy specifically for fucks sake you illiterate bad faith trolls.
Good advice, why dont you take it.
_AACO@reddit
That's the summary of the documents not me saying I agree with what they say.
Just because you don't agree with law doesn't mean you're immune to it.
_AACO@reddit
That's the summary of the legal documents, not mr agreeing with them.
renisi@reddit
KDE e.V. is a "gemeinnütziger eingetragener Verein" (charitable/non-profit registered association) and to be charitable/non-profit it needs to be altruistic. The german law says:
(1) Sponsorship or support is provided altruistically if it does not primarily pursue its own economic purposes - for example, commercial purposes or other profit-making purposes - and if the following conditions are met:
1.The corporation's funds may only be used for the purposes set out in the articles of association. The members or shareholders (members within the meaning of these regulations) may not receive any profit shares or, in their capacity as members, any other benefits from the funds of the corporation. The corporation may not use its funds for the direct or indirect support or promotion of political parties.
[...]
3.The corporation may not favour any person through expenditure that is alien to the purpose of the corporation or through disproportionately high remuneration.
[...]
5.Subject to Section 62, the corporation must use its funds promptly for its tax-privileged statutory purposes. Utilisation in this sense also includes the use of funds for the acquisition or production of assets that serve statutory purposes. Funds are deemed to have been utilised promptly if they are used for the tax-privileged statutory purposes within two calendar or financial years following the inflow at the latest. Sentence 1 does not apply to corporations with an annual income of no more than EUR 45,000.
Source: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/ao_1977/__55.html
dobbelj@reddit
Oh, so the Germans are idiots. That explains a lot really.
sidit77@reddit
I believe this is referring to AO § 55:
powerfulparadox@reddit
A couple points in case people need some help understanding what's going on:
Non-profit organizations are required to operate under the rules of the country they are established in (and, in the case of an international organization, where they have established permanent operations). This means that the Red Cross and KDE likely have different rules governing how they operate (and the Red Cross potentially has more leeway because they can move assets around as needed between different branches under different sets of rules - I'm not an expert, though, so the specifics of this are beyond me until I do more research).
Saying that non-profits are required to keep extra funds low is not equivalent to saying they can't have funds available (I've seen multiple possible definitions of what "low" could mean, and none were equivalent to "no liquidity"). And, while I also would appreciate more detail, especially regarding KDE's particular case, it's probably another case of redditors from all over working from memory of slightly different sets of rules.
CrazyKilla15@reddit
How does that make sense? There are already rules on how they can spend and accept money. It shouldnt matter how much is saved so long as they're following those rules
dinominant@reddit
With your deliberate spend on developers, can you please prioritize backwards compatability soem more?
Every time I get an update, there is some new UI element that radically alters my workflows, with no option to turn it off or revert to the old behaviour.
I was just upgraded to Plasma 6 on my distro and now most of my right-click actions are gone. I'm seriously considering going back in time with older Debian versions becasue of this constnat update-induced breakage.
I have work I need to get done and I don't have time to redesign my workflow for every update. This is one of the reasons I moved away from Windows.
Derkades@reddit
Some very infrequently used options were removed, but they can always be added back. I believe KDE already cares very deeply for specific use cases and makes everything configurable for this reason. With every change, there is almost guaranteed to be a configuration option to switch to the previous behavior.
vanwaldi@reddit
Honestly, it seems baffling to me you can build and maintain a full fledged and cohesive working desktop that gives Win/MacOS a run for its money with only 500k of expenses... Impressive to say the least.
cloggedsink941@reddit
Well there's no product managers and VPs :D
mvolling@reddit
Thank you for your insight!
From the initial write up, I was concerned about the accelerating expenses. Glad to hear that was the intention.
Ste4th@reddit
Thanks for the great work! :)
bostwickenator@reddit
A lot of tech companies overspent on hires during the pandemic for similar cash flow reasons and then started laying people off when the situation normalized and revenue hadn't increased in line with headcount. Try not to fall into that same trap, it's very demoralizing for everyone.
TheTaurenCharr@reddit
Unfortunate misleading title by Phoronix.
Non-profits are non-profits. If they had an alarming case with their funds, that would be a news title from the non-profit themselves.
We see this exact information summarisation for Gnome Foundation as well, which creates misinformation around non-profit organisations altogether - as if they have to have net gain annually.
aphantombeing@reddit
I read about a company having 1.4 million in donations and are not using it for anything. Maybe gimp or some other. It was famous project
sam-sung-sv@reddit
Wow
And yet cant even hire a UI designer expert
8milenewbie@reddit
The unintuitive design would be somewhat tolerable if it was like a Blender vs Maya situation where GIMP was actually more powerful than proprietary image editors, but as it stands it currently lags behind Photoshop, Affinity Photo, and even Photopea in terms of features. We are just getting non-destructive edits in the next release of GIMP 3 (Soon™), and it's not even a complete NDE system.
At this point it feels like the GIMP devs are intentionally not using the money because they don't want to hire more devs or be beholden to the wider FOSS community to deliver more frequent updates and features. That's fine, they have the right to do that. But this means we need to stop recommending GIMP as an image editing alternative for professionals and amateurs who want to make the switch to Linux and FOSS.
CMYK-Student@reddit
I'm not directly involved in tthis, but part of the fiscal sponsorship agreement mentioned in this GNOME announcement is handling the conversion from Bitcoin to a more "usable" currency. I know there've been talks with the Blender Foundation about tax issues caused by transferring that amount of money, and none of the current developers have the experience to navigate that. I don't know the current status of the conversion, but I do know the goal is fund developers to speed up feature development and releases.
As for NDE, it's definitely early stages but I've already heard a lot of good feedback from people using it (and we've dealt with a lot of bug reports from 2.99.18, haha). I'd be interested in what additional features people want prioritized after 3.0 - my initial plan is to add import/export of layer effects in PSDs since improving PSD support is always helpful.
TechnoRechno@reddit
That's GIMP with Bitcoin, and I believe the issue is it's unclear if they can legally convert it to real money since finance laws caught up to Bitcoin
Spiritual_Rooster_49@reddit
Can you imagine if the GIMP lead really cared about having a good open-source picture editor? They'd donate that money to Photopea in exchange for them going open-source, then they'd shut down GIMP.
Sarin10@reddit
because a browser based editor is the same thing as desktop software, and because we need less options, not more. got it.
LaZZeYT@reddit
Probably gimp with a massive amount of idle bitcoins.
aphantombeing@reddit
Yes. I did guess that it might be gimp and searched and couldn't find results in first page. And, I didn't want to write name unless I was sure.
razirazo@reddit
Yeah its really weird way to say it. Its like saying Army or Government Hospitals is operating at loss
omniuni@reddit
The title is literally just that they operated at a loss. That's true.
MrAlagos@reddit
First, I want to apologize to KDE members about this comment not being directly about KDE, thankfully some people have already pointed out the legal requirements for non profits as well as KDE's financial situation and the planning about the use of its funds.
However, I cannot pretend not to notice the differences between this and the time earlier this year when the similar financial situation of the GNOME foundation was plastered all over the Internet with lies (by the likes of Bryan Lunduke), clickbaited and used by GNOME haters to incite even more hate and misinformation.
I think that non-profits and free software projects should stand by each other and fight misinformation together.
witchhunter0@reddit
I've noticed that too, does GNOME abide by the same laws?
MrAlagos@reddit
The GNOME Foundations is based in the USA, thus it abides to the American laws for non-profits. KDE is based in Germany, thus it abides to the German laws for non-profits. I don't know the differences, but there are definitely requirements and limitations for both.
Commander-ShepardN7@reddit
I'd be alarmed if this was System76, an actual company that sells products, this is fine, they're non profit
adamkex@reddit
Shame that the major corporate distros and government entities like the EU don't give more support to KDE. It's one of the best DEs and the best DE for anyone transitioning from Windows.
witchhunter0@reddit
Why only corporate distros and governments? There are foundations, nongovernmental organizations, universities. Speaking of latter, many of nearly graduates get hired before even finishing school. There are skilled devs within KDE too. Some companies can also present themselves in a bright light, only by being recognized as a nice environment for work. As far as I know small organizations need as little as €5000 to be recognized as KDE patrons.
Furthermore, it wouldn't kill some organizations that already use KDE to some extent, to donate yearly. I assume that e.g. CERN research center spend more than that for just 1% of hourly electricity bill.
m_zwolin@reddit
An uneducated conclusion still 85% upvotes, . C'mon
Littux@reddit (OP)
I think, not it is why.
I didn't read the comments in Phoronix first
Nova_496@reddit
Edit your misleading post then.
Littux@reddit (OP)
No edit button
ECrispy@reddit
I wish KDE was better funded and more popular.
Really don't like the RH monopoly and how they have basically pushed Gnome to be the default in every distro. Unlike systemd Gnome doesn't even have any technical merits, quite the opposite.
small_tit_girls_pmMe@reddit
Gnome is great.
Stop trying to turn DE preference into something akin to a console fanboy war.
gellenburg@reddit
Non profit organizations are not supposed to make a profit.
whoscheckingin@reddit
They aren't but they are supposed to be operating at bake even.
gellenburg@reddit
That just means they're expenses are too high for the amount of donations they're receiving. They need to trim the fat.
CCJtheWolf@reddit
Think the whole world is operating at a loss right now. But can be expected since they put all those resources into porting KDE Plasma to QT6. They probably could have taken their time and coasted on Plasma 5 for another year, but they took a risk. Hopefully next year they'll even out.
AlterNate@reddit
Maybe they could stay under budget by removing a few million features.
asenz@reddit
How about KDE finally, after so many years focusing its efforts and polishing its products instead of spreading into oblivion.
mrlinkwii@reddit
it is/was ,
tbh they could save 20k+ if they move events more online , which will cut on costs
d_ed@reddit
We could. But the goal isn't to make profit. The goal is to support the project.
The vibe from an online event and an IRL event are worlds apart. I'm 100% sure the IRL events in KDE and meeting people there is a massive contributing factor for sticking around and working on the project back when I was a volunteer.
mrlinkwii@reddit
the goal is to make the project viable in the long run ( ie near enough a balanced book) , which is the goal for most non-profits , while kde is miles better in gnome in this aspect
in 2022 report kde ran ran with a loss of ~100K https://ev.kde.org/reports/ev-2022/ ( income of 285,495.97 and expenses of 384,604.78)
and in 2023 kde ran with a loss of ~106k https://ev.kde.org/reports/ev-2023/ ( income of 349,332.65 and an expense of -457,071.31 )
in 2021 report ran with a profit of ~20k https://ev.kde.org/reports/ev-2021/( income of 238,929.67 and expenses of 218,396.75)
while i 100% agree your miles better than gnome is doing budgeting wise all im saying is you dont want costs spiraling out of control .
linmanfu@reddit
The language of "profit" is unhelpful here, because people might think it means "money given to shareholders". A better term is "surplus".
FreakSquad@reddit
ex. I would encourage folks to check out the feedback on the GNOME Discourse about the hybrid GUADEC held this year - almost everyone pointed out the major missed opportunities of having folks in multiple different locations, as they then couldn’t have the kind of high-bandwidth group conversations and development with others working on the same projects that they could have in person.
stirringpots@reddit
Running in the red isn't necessarily bad if done correctly.
epic_pork@reddit
FYI you can easily donate to KDE using GitHub sponsors. I tried to donate directly at first, but my credit card provider denied for some obscure reason.
https://github.com/sponsors/KDE
themanfromoctober@reddit
I just switched to KDE last night
erwan@reddit
I wasn't aware KDE had employees, how many are they?
tonymurray@reddit
They started paying contributors awhile back and keep a small staff for administration. In order to keep non-profit status they need to reduce their cash reserves.