Hello, everyone. Welcome to another FastTrack talk about financial support for working on KDE.
Let's see what these buttons do. This is too fast. Wait.
What is the next? Oh, no. This is... Ah, yes. Right.
I wanted to start with this slide because this is an internet address.
Let's just start with the most important thing. I want you to fill this in.
So let's start with this one. This is a form where you can request financial
support. If you have a good idea, you can send it in here.
And we will look at it. And we will maybe fund you.
So, yeah, that's it. Now I have some more slides. But I wanted to start with
this one because it's important. Write it in your browser and bookmark it.
Who am I? I am Jos van den Hoever. I work at NLNet.
I was long ago also an active contributor in KDE. Somebody remembers Strigi here?
No, no. Oh, one or two hands. Yeah, they don't look very happy.
It got replaced by Baloo long ago.
So, and yes, desktop search is always a tough problem.
Caligra is also something I worked on. It's recently revived by Carl.
And the Rust bindings that were maybe lessons learned for the current iteration
of Rust bindings. But I'm still a KDE user.
Yeah, what is NLNet? We used to be the first internet provider in the Netherlands.
And it started off with modems as a hobby, as a project at a university.
And it grew and grew, and money came in. What to do with this money?
Well, let's spend it on open source software. So that's what happened.
Eventually, it was sold, and the money that was gotten from this sale was used
to sponsor even more open source software.
And Lnet has been doing that for decades now, and we have a lot of experience,
in giving out money to open source projects and open hardware projects.
And we do this as a service now. So we are a matchmaker between people with
money and people with time and expertise.
And we couple them and make more open source.
Currently, we have more than a thousand projects in our history of projects that we have supported.
And this is the list. You can just type some keywords to filter it and have
an idea of all the stuff that we've been doing.
Now, when it comes to specifically KDE, here's some example projects that we've
been doing. Caligra is something we did more than 10 years ago.
We thought it was a very important project. I was actually a recipient at the
time to work on open document formats and loading and saving of that,
introducing perhaps a made-to-do to track changes in documents.
Another recent example is Ocular. So Ocular got support to improve the digital signing of PDF files.
Kden, the XMPP chat application, got encrypted chats and encrypted video calls
and account portability.
Kmail got improved mail encryption.
Neochat got encryption. Well, there's a theme here. we got some money from the
European Commission to work on privacy and security encryption.
And so, yeah, we supported a lot of encryption.
Dolphin is currently getting money to have a secure admin mode.
So, you know, you don't have to make the whole Dolphin red when you use it as root.
KDE Connect has been receiving support to re-implement the discovery between devices.
LabPlot has gotten better statistical methods and support to do plotting.
Plasma Wayland recently has gotten a touch interface, better handling of that
for digital artists and people with impairments.
And so that's a lot of KDE projects. Why do we like KDE so much?
Well, the vision of KDE just matches really well with what an LNAT does.
So whenever a project from an LNAT comes in, it already has a big pre and that
is the large community that KDE has, right?
It has a long history of writing good software and it cares about standards.
It creates reusable building blocks to frameworks. So anything that's done in
KDE has a huge multiplier effect, which is, we think that's great. It lives by its values.
Carl is next, sorry, not Carl. Ben is next door doing, talking about all the
the server hosting that KDE does all
by itself and living its values of self-hosting the stuff that it needs.
And it has mature projects, which sometimes have tough tasks that need to be
implemented, which somebody can't do on a Saturday, but they need more support for that.
And that's when it's an ideal time to come to us and we can perhaps help financially.
So besides helping financially, every project that comes to us,
which is obviously not only KDE, in fact, KDE proposals are way too less at
the moment. That's why I'm here.
Every project that comes to us gets money, but they also get a security scan.
They get help with packaging. They get help with licensing, testing setup.
They get mentoring and they also get help with translating and possibly in the
future, even more things.
And this is a model that is very similar to how the KDE community works,
because here you have so many people with different expertises,
like Nico said yesterday in his lightning talk, different expertises that come
together and together work as a team with a lot of expertise to make great products.
So we are trying to emulate that, also for people that come in with a good idea,
but don't have this community.
We have people that can help with that.
So, this is supposed to be an inspirational slide.
We have a huge task ahead, right? This big red ball here is all the proprietary
collection of all proprietary users that use all this closed software.
And in relation, the false users, that's just a tiny bubble.
So we need to have this big blue arrow to siphon people from the one to the
other so So that we go to this awesome situation.
And yeah, I know that everybody here would like to have this.
And so let's do it. And your time and expertise is much valued.
And here's a quick explanation of our process.
How does it work? You fill in a form. Then there's a first round.
Maybe you get a sad email.
If you get a happy email, we ask you questions about, you know,
how exactly are you going to do this stuff and then maybe um you get accepted
and then you write a plan you do the work and you get paid that's it we want
to have as little bureaucracy as we can,
as we can make possible we really want to help the developers focus on coding,
who can apply well all genders all countries individuals
communities companies we are very flexible with how we support you whatever
your situation is if you are a single person or if you're just a group who meets
here and would like to together send in a proposal that's fine we are flexible
with getting you paid in many ways.
So, go write a proposal. There's a buff session where I will be helping you if you need that.
I will also talk about other funding than just an LNAT.
We can do matchmaking between projects because maybe we already are sponsoring
something that would be a good match to work with.
And, yeah, you can catch me here in the halls. I'm here until Thursday to ask me any questions.
Let's make it happen.
Thank you.