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I find it quite surprising that the top comment on "Gnome Receives €1M from German Government" is criticising the effort, saying they spent the money on the wro
by tentacleuno 3y ago
I find it quite surprising that the top comment on "Gnome Receives €1M from German Government" is criticising the effort, saying they spent the money on the wrong thing.
Ok, I'll say it. Thank you, German Government -- open-source needs funding, and organisations like yours helps to keep things going, making sure we get cool new features :)
- asddubs 3y agoFully agreed. The gnome paradigm is not for me, but it's good to see open source desktops receiving funding. a rising tide lifts all boats
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agoGiving tax payer money to a non-profit that pays its executive 100k a year is questionable (you never see that kind of salary in germany), specially when the foundation's expenses keep growing while their revenue decreases, it is poorly managed
- myaccountonhn 3y agoIn Sweden a tech executive can def. earn 100K a year. I find it hard to imagine Germany being that different (salaries are generally higher there).
- asddubs 3y ago100k a year isn't that much for an executive
- chii 3y ago> pays its executive 100k a year is questionable (you never see that kind of salary in germany) really? Executives are quite important in making sure the organization they're in charge of is well run, efficient and reaches the stated goals. Paying a low salary to an executive for a non-profit will merely make the non-profit less efficient at achieving their goals. Just because it's a non-profit, doesn't mean the workers in the organization should be self-sacrificing their own salary (by accepting a lower-than-market rate). Now, there's a point to be made where if an executive's achievements or effectiveness at directing the organization is poor, they need to be booted, or at least have performance incentives etc. As for the grant being tax-payer funded, i don't see why it is any worse a form of spending than welfare.
- hef19898 3y ago100k is the upper (upper-upper but still) end of the IG Metal collectively bargained frame contract for the metal and electronics industry in Bavaria. As soon as you lead a department, you make more. Leading a department as in you are not the hierachical equivalent of a senior manager in a US company, rather somewhere at Level 6 at a plave like Amazon. Directors and VP make considerably more. So 100k salaries are totally a thing in Germany for white collar employees.
- laurentlb 3y agoI have no idea what this person does or should be paid, but as a software engineer in Germany, I have earned much more than that.
- hashtag-til 3y agoYes! People lose sight that 100k is not life-changing sort of money.
- namtab00 3y agoAlso, people lose sight that other people's conditions are not the same as their own.
- hashtag-til 3y agoThe missing context here is that you don't get from zero to 100k salary in normal circumstances. By the time you arrive at that level, then you're already having someone willing to pay you that for the value you bring. On the "life changing" aspect, consider this thread is about German market and therefore cost of living. Given that, I'm confident to say 100k is not life changing. Comfortable salary range? yes absolutely, but not something you can just get this amount once and be sorted for life.
- fragmede 3y agoIt absolutely is if you're poor.
- hashtag-til 3y agoSure, in case you have nothing and win 100k in the lottery I agree. The context here is completely different though, we are talking about specialized white collar jobs in the German/european market.
- hashtag-til 3y agoMost mid career specialized functions in tech areas can get you to €100k. It’s not really rare these days. Certainly not a reason to criticize the German government for this great initiative. It also set a good example for startup folks that use a lot of open source and in most cases give nothing back.
- mort96 3y agoUsually these sorts of complaints relate to executives who earn many many millions per year. 100k per year seems perfectly reasonable?
- teekert 3y ago100k a year is the cheapest executive I’ve ever seen.
- pinkgolem 3y agoWhat? Am German.. know multiple people with that salerie and higher... For an executive this is a low salery, even in Germany.
- RamblingCTO 3y ago> For an executive this is a low salary, even in Germany. Sorry, but simply not true. You might want to look into statistics and not extrapolate from your vicinity.
- hef19898 3y agoOr you can look at the puplic tariff tables for all kinds of jobs, find out that 100k is the upper limit there in a lot of cases, and then realize that those tables barely touch the lower ranks of middle management, not to talk about executives. No statistics needed there.
- pinkgolem 3y ago... We are not talking müllers IT Services GmbH Doing Websites for restaurants here.. I know there are plenty of those wasting massive potential in germany and even in those the level executive(which I would roughly match with the German title Prokurist, also it's not a perfect match) is above the 100k range (average 125k) https://www.glassdoor.de/Geh%C3%A4lter/prokurist-gehalt-SRCH_KO0,9.htm https://www.glassdoor.de/Geh%C3%A4lter/prokurist-gehalt-SRCH...
- RamblingCTO 3y agoI don't consider the average indicative. Have a look at the graph and you'll see that it's skewed because of fewer but higher paid execs.
- pinkgolem 3y ago... Did you look at the graph? It effectively starts around 88k... Aka the bottom 10% earn less then 100k + it's the base salary... Bonuses come on top and are usually significant, starting from 7k according to Glassdoor And we are including müllers it services here
- simbolit 3y ago>you never see that kind of salary in germany Here is the Glassdoor page for "software manager" in Germany: https://www.glassdoor.de/Gehälter/software-manager-gehalt-SRCH_KO0,16.htm https://www.glassdoor.de/Gehälter/software-manager-gehalt-SR... As you can easily see, the job pays up to 150k, with 100k on average. Where is the truth?
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agoFor a non-profit?
- nickpeterson 3y agoI know a few people who work for medical non-profits, they make well into the 6 figure range. It was somewhat eye opening to me. They are not doctors.
- WanderPanda 3y agoIf funded by private donors it seems legit but if this is funded by tax money it smells like a grift
- hef19898 3y agoSo what shoild be the max salary for public servants then? Keep in mind we do want qualified people there, not that everybody wants to work in the private sector.
- qayxc 3y agoRegulation for non-profits in Germany doesn't prevent employees from being paid competitive salaries for comparable positions. So if the average salary for a given position is about 100k€, nothing would be stopping a non-profit from paying a comparable sum.
- depr 3y agoPay peanuts, get monkeys
- fs111 3y ago> you never see that kind of salary in germany) You need to work on your negotiating skills
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agoYou need to be more careful with your tax payer money funding foreign foundations that already have plenty of cash available https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/43572618/IRS%2F043572618_202109_990_2022082220291826 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/43572...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- safety1st 3y agoReally? They're paying their new Chief Executive Shaman $100K a year? (Yes, I too was surprised to learn that Gnome is now run by a self-described Shaman with no engineering experience)
- imtringued 3y ago>you never see that kind of salary in germany) Then you haven't been paying attention for what your GEZ fees are being spent on.
- cmarschner 3y agoRest assured 6-digit salaries are quite common in areas like Munich, and if you work for US companies like Google or Microsoft they can be double or triple that, or even more, through stocks. The sad truth as well is that there are not enough successful and large tech companies in Germany that you would see those there as well.
- dukeyukey 3y ago> you never see that kind of salary in germany I can't speak specifically for Germany, but in the UK Germany has a reputation for paying better, and €100k would be pretty par-for-the-course for a senior developer, and stingy for a staff/principal engineer.
- blueflow 3y agoFor 100k a year i would hire a developer and a UI design person and make a better desktop environment than what gnome currently is.
- kubiton 3y agoWe pay so much more money to Microsoft I hardly think your argument is relevant at all.
- mciancia 3y agoLol, SWEs and execs can earn more than 100k Eur in Poland (not every company though). Is Germany that far behind?
- raincole 3y agoSo if something is open source it's immune to criticism? Let's assume KDE and Gnome are equally good in every single aspect. In this case, don't you think it's a little bit weird that German government chooses Gnome over KDE, whose origin in Germany? It's not charity, but taxpayers' money.
- spinningslate 3y agoThat's not what the post says: >I find it [...] surprising that the top comment [...] is criticising the effort Nothing about it being immune to criticism, just surprised that the dominant post (as the time) was critical. The puzzle of successfully funding open source is ever present. A government has made a meaningful investment in an open source project. It might not be your favourite project, and it doubtless has challenges. But I'm with GP in seeing this as net good news.
- addicted 3y agoCriticizing Gnome and KDE is not the same as criticizing the German effort to fund open source SW projects. Yeah, the criticism of the effort absolutely seems misplaced. Even the criticism of the money going to Gnome seems misplaced unless someone has gone through the criteria and identified which criteria they find unhelpful, or goes through Gnome’s application and identifies where they’ve misidentified. Otherwise a criticism of the effort sounds simply like someone who has done no work at all, looks at an effort that has clearly put in a lot of process and safeguards (as evident simply from the application submitted), didn’t like the result but out of sheer laziness don’t even try to identify what went wrong and decided to piss all over the people who are actually putting in money, time, resources and effort to do something. Unfortunately this is quite common in the open source world. People who don’t actually do any of the work (which includes me, even if I’ve submitted a few PRs) that go around telling the people doing the actual work that they’re doing it wrong without putting in the effort to show how or why they’re doing it wrong.
- mr_mitm 3y agoIt's just paradoxical that they would have received less criticism if they didn't donate anything at all.
- moffkalast 3y agoAs a KDE user, I dare say I'm literally shaking with rage /s
- pjbster 3y agoWhereas I am still livid that KDE missed an open goal by calling their calendar KOrganiser instead of KPassa.
- moffkalast 3y agoWhy not just kall it the Kalendar?
- nottheengineer 3y agoBecause it would confuse germans even more than Konsole.
- diffeomorphism 3y agohttps://github.com/KDE/kalendar https://github.com/KDE/kalendar I am not quite sure how kalendar, korganizer and kontact fit together.
- hk1337 3y agoA play on the Spanish, qué pasa? (What’s up?)
- redder23 3y agoThey abandoned that K naming scheme years ago. They do not do that kind of stuff anymore. What you see is only stuff, leftovers.
- hashtag-til 3y agoWell, then challenge the status quo and donate to KDE! https://kde.org/community/donations/ https://kde.org/community/donations/
- redder23 3y ago
- Roark66 3y agoI'm probably the last person to praise the German government for anything, but one has to recognise a good decision. The next question is, why so little and only to Gnome?
- junon 3y agoThey constantly give funding to projects FWIW. I don't know at this scale though.
- dubbel 3y agoOverall this project by the German government gives 11.5 million euros per year to a number of open source projects. Looking at the list on https://sovereigntechfund.de/en/ https://sovereigntechfund.de/en/ my highlights are: Improving the security of the Python and JavaScript ecosystem, this was very much needed, curl, wireguard, and OpenSSH.
- oytis 3y agoI dunno, sponsoring open source is good, but desktop environment is such a fragile and transient part of the system, that it feels this money would better serve some more fundamental project. I.e. it not self-evident to me what's the return of this investment (in terms of common good) will be looking 10 years forward where some other desktop environment can become more fashionable.
- flashback2199 3y ago> desktop environment is such a fragile and transient part of the system That might be part of the point of the money. Also, gnome isn't going anywhere, it's been around for decades, and we watched Ubuntu the most popular distro by google trends move away from gnome only to go back to gnome a while later
- pjmlp 3y agoI miss Unity, nowadays using XFCE.
- throwaway914 3y agoGnome is so much better than what I remember in 2005. I've also grown up a little, and my internet connection is much faster. Yes, XFCE plays nicer on lighter hardware but I'm very happy with less sprawling dependencies and the polish in Gnome today. Plus Gnome is the one most likely to have HDR, VRR, and such sooner. I'm just not looking forward to next year with Apple Vision Pro. We're finally getting well-rounded desktop environments on Linux, now we have to edge into "spatial computer" desktop environments. That will take 20 years to catch up to. I'm still convinced every desktop environment should be a physics simulator - 2D or 3D. If you want consistent animations, changes of state, etc. you don't hardcode these into your application. Your application should exist in a physics simulator. Your windows are objects with layers. You're looking at a composited view of them. In 2023 we have the hardware and the know-how to run physics simulators as your desktop environments. </tinfoil-hat>
- 3y ago
- pjmlp 3y agoIndeed, only with these kind of sponsorship can The Year of Desktop Linux actually happen. I am aware of a few German cities having a custom SuSE version with KDE on their libraries, for the employees and terminals available to the public.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]