Should Fedora sponsor the KDE project as an official patron?

I suggest to also clarify the legal issues in advance to avoid wasted efforts. Sponsoring events and joining an association are legally completely different processes, even if they feel comparable:


Supporting Members - KDE e.V. :

If your company or organization would like to become a supporting member please have a look at the information how to become a supporting member of the KDE e.V.


Become a Supporting Member of the KDE e.V. - KDE e.V. :

Corporations or individuals wishing to show exceptional financial commitment to the KDE project may extend their supporting membership with additional patronage. Patrons of KDE pay yearly membership fees of:


Articles of Association - KDE e.V. :

4.1 Both natural persons and legal bodies wanting to implement and promote the aims of the association may become members. Taking into account the international character of the Association and to give members the possibility to stop actively supporting and developing KDE without necessarily losing their membership, the following types of memberships are available:

4.1. c) Supporting Members are extraordinary members supporting the Association’s purposes and aims primarily through financial or material contributions.


Fedora itself is no legal body, and therefore also not a corporation. I am not sure if a workaround is legally that easy. So I guess it would be Red Hat that would formally need to take the membership. So, if and what workarounds are possible, or if it is possible that Red Hat takes the formal membership, should be clarified.

Fedora is an unincorporated association of individuals. There’s no formal legal body, but we do exist. :slight_smile:

I have faith that since this would be a mutually-positive agreement between two projects, we could work out the legal stuff from both sides.

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KDE is a legal body and incorporated association. Their capability to re-interpret their charter as they wish is limited. Further, they have to fulfill charity criteria, which further limits their capability to interpret things in their own favor. Law ain’t that easy, and I guess this is not different in the US :wink:

The limitation I see is primarily not by German law, but by the charter KDE choose to incorporate which now has to be interpreted in the German & European legal environment, not in KDE’s favor: Although unincorporated associations also exist in Germany, the KDE charter excludes them: unincorporated associations are explicitly no legal bodies until they become incorporated themselves.

Also, although I was not working with such issues for long, I think unincorporated associations are generally not allowed to become member of incorporated ones as they have no legal capacity (I do not know the formal English term for the latter).

Even beyond that: I am not sure if Fedora fulfills the criteria for unincorporated associations in here because I guess it does not have more than 1 liable member (?), plus further criteria.

Sorry for playing the lawyer here. I will not intervene anylonger, but my suggestion remains :wink:

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I’m not sure what we would use as benchmarks. Generally speaking our engagement and relationship with KDE is improving and our feedback is influencing how KDE folks develop the future of the KDE Plasma platform.

From my perspective, as long as things continue as they are, I’d be happy to maintain patronage of KDE. It would give us an opportunity to support the longer-term health of an important project from the Fedora perspective and solidify our position that KDE is important to us.

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It would be nice to put something concrete to that. Which feedback, how much of it, where does it go, how does it land, etc.

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Hi, I don’t know if this thread got hung up when I think it is very important. I am a Linux user who for many years has been unstable, for various reasons. In recent years I found however with Fedora, a desire to achieve greater longevity in my stay in Linux, to the point that at present, it is the only operating system I use. However, this has only been possible thanks to KDE. In the past I tried distributions famous for having GNOME as the default desktop and therefore, the desktop recommended by that company, and I had a disastrous experience with GNOME, both for continuous errors/crashes/instability and more importantly user interface, of which design I would say, could be emphasized as more childish and more focused on tablets. I think GNOME can be perhaps an option for tablets, but in no case for a professional experience on a workstation. For me, KDE is synonymous of quality and professionalism, and it has been thanks to it that I have been able to argue a stable return in time in Linux in general, and Fedora in specific, because, if Fedora KDE Spin had not existed, for sure I would not have installed it, since KDE is for me an absolute requirement, for a fluid, flexible, professional and rich experience, which in no case can be provided by a desktop environment as GNOME which, as I was saying, could be more characterized as a childish/tablet focused desktop environment.

That is why my conclusions are the following:

  • Fedora should have as default desktop environment KDE, since Fedora is the Rolling Release of a company (distribution) with business/professional dyes, it is, a distribution and serious company, as is Red Hat.

  • Fedora should therefore, of course, be KDE’s Patron, both for recognition / respect for the project, as well as per Fedora / Redhat’s economic capacity. Although I am aware, as I am just now reading the history of GNOME, that Red Hat was one of the founding companies of GNOME, and is on the Advisory Board, contributing with at least $23,000 USD per year to the project. However it contributes 0$ USD to KDE.

  • Red Hat is from the United States, just like GNOME. Maybe because of that, there is a certain bias to self-fund each other, maybe Red Hat already has developers working on GNOME, and maybe because of that, Chris was talking about limitations and other subjective questions of the German law, which are surely more related to the fact that KDE is German and not American. I think it would be important to work on overcoming those limitations easily, if we have a clear knowledge of our needs and have a clear vision of the logical steps to be on the track of a more successful project.

  • My high respect for Fedora was born thanks to KDE, since, as I said previously, I had a bad experience with Fedora GNOME, both because of stability and UX/UI, and I would never have used it again if it were not for KDE. I am sure that, like me, there will be thousands of other users, who maybe not because of a bad experience, but because of personal desire, prefer KDE and would not like to renounce to Fedora.

  • Related to the previous point and to the fact that my final wish is to stay in Linux thanks to KDE, I entered the KDE Wikipedia today for the first time to read about KDE history and that’s where I noticed the KDE Patrons, and I noticed that Fedora / Redhat were not part of it, which has been a cause of great concern to me, since it means that Redhat/Fedora not only offer their default distribution with GNOME, but they don’t even fund or collaborate with KDE, and for a “hardcore” KDE user, I have come to consider it as a vital point, since, it is assumed, or understood, that for a good inter-relationship between a distribution and its graphical environment, at least, the distribution should collaborate minimally with that graphical environment, because otherwise, and aside of system stability good practices, I think it is, or could be, almost an insult to the KDE user (I don’t even want to imagine what it must mean for the founders or developers of KDE, if even a very simple user feels “insulted” [obviously I speak in very mild terms] for not having its favorite distribution collaborating with its favorite desktop environment).

  • This issue has led me to look at the KDE top patrons, and I noted that they are Canonical / Kubuntu and OpenSUSE. Regarding Canonical / Kubuntu, we are in a similar situation in that entering the Ubuntu website and not directly to the Kubuntu website (you have to have specific knowledge to do so), the user is offered by default the distribution with GNOME and at no time is asked about what desktop environment he/she wants. Finding Kubuntu is also difficult, since you have to drop down the download menu, and go to the bottom right to Ubuntu Flavors, and there you must know right away that KDE is in Kubuntu. Therefore, it is not given the facility to the novice user or the unfamiliar user, to download by default a KDE distribution, Exactly the same happens with Fedora. That is why I think that, as a suggestion to the KDE Advisory Board, in the number 1 position of KDE Patrons should be OpenSUSE, since it is the only distribution that offers KDE by default in its official download, so they put it very clear that for them KDE is better than GNOME. That is why I think that Kubuntu should not be in the first position, although I understand that, the Advisory Board may have taken the decision taking into account perhaps only economic amounts of which I am unaware.

I don’t know if my comments can be useful, even a thousandth, to both KDE and Fedora, but personally, although I am extremely comfortable with Fedora, it makes me feel pretty bad that Fedora / Redhat only supports GNOME and I would wish to see that at some point they decide to support KDE, a matter that I think is vital for any user who values minimally the inter-collaboration between companies. In fact, the main reason why I installed Fedora, is because Redhat supports Fedora. Therefore, if I use KDE instead of GNOME, and, Fedora (>Redhat) only supports GNOME, it is, it doesn’t support KDE, being the desktop environment a 90% of the final user experience, it basically dismounts the main reason why I use Fedora (a good and big company that supports the software that I want to use).

To conclude, I am a totally independent user, who has been using Linux on and off for about 20 years, and I am not and have never been involved in any way with any KDE, Fedora, Gnome or Linux development groups, so my opinion is a totally disinterested one based on purely logical, ethical and emotional motivations.

Thanks to all and I hope that Fedora supports KDE and put it in the future as the default desktop environment, or at least, in the download, force to choose between KDE and GNOME, giving the novice / unfamiliar user a preview of what is each to make his/her decision, since the experience between both is night and day.

Best regards