In 2018, the KDE project developers received more than $ 0.5 million in donations. And not only they ...

The life of many free software development teams is full of asceticism, overcoming difficulties and obstacles, and often communities survive solely due to the altruistic beliefs and dedication of their members. Not all popular free products manage to find a stable and reliable source of funding. However, sometimes fate gives deserved gifts. So this year happened with the KDE project. Twice.

KDE is an organization and international community around it that develops free software: the Plasma desktop environment and the KDE Applications suite. The main source of funds for the project is the collection of donations and targeted fundraising campaigns .
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On October 15, 2018, the non-profit organization KDE eV, which oversees the development of the KDE project, reported receiving a donation of $ 300,000 for the 22nd anniversary of the project from another community of enthusiasts, Handshake.org. And 100 thousand dollars, from the received 300 thousand, will go on development of free office Calligra package.



How did it happen that one community of free software activists was suddenly able to provide such solid support to another group of activists? The fact is that in the framework of the co-financing campaign, Handshake.org managed to raise more than 10.2 million dollars to develop its platform, which significantly exceeded the planned budget. The developers considered it dishonest to keep the surplus for themselves, so it was decided to spend 70% of the amount received to help other significant free projects.



The Handshake.org community develops a decentralized system of domain names and digital certificates that can be used as an alternative, reliable and verifiable infrastructure for root DNS servers and certification centers that are not controlled by a narrow circle of stakeholders and are not subject to censorship. The Handshake project is not aimed at completely crowding out the DNS protocol, but aims to create a backup infrastructure for traditional centralized root zones and root servers in the form of a distributed base built on the basis of the blockchain and P2P communications.

In addition to the KDE Project, the steering committee of the Handshake.org community also financially supported the GNOME project, transferring 400 thousand dollars to it (100 thousand is intended exclusively for GIMP). Handshake.org also announced support for several other projects and organizations such as the Apache Software Foundation, Arch Linux, Debian, EFF, FSF, GNU, Internet Archive, LibreSSL, Mozilla, OpenSSL, Tor, Wikipedia and several others.



But that is not all. Eight months earlier, KDE developers reported receiving a donation in cryptocurrency equivalent to 200 thousand dollars (18.7 BTC) from the mysterious charity foundation Pineapple. The Pineapple Foundation was established by an anonymous cryptocurrency philanthropist to stimulate the development of important non-commercial projects and in total allocated funds to 57 organizations. Thus, Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation, Let's Encrypt received $ 250 thousand, the OpenStreetMap Foundation $ 150 thousand, and the OpenBSD Foundation $ 50 thousand.

Thus, we are faced with an interesting precedent, when people, instead of embezzling and multiplying the super-wealth that fell on them, chose to share money with others in need, with the best of intentions. Do you like such actions?