While it's doubtful you'll see ads in KDE's core applications, it would be possible for distributions that wish to further monetize their work to fork these applications, placing ads in them.

QT Press Announce

https://www.qt.io/blog/monetizing-cross-platform-use-cases-faster-and-easier-with-qt-digital-advertising-platform

Update, got a response in my subreddit. Credit for this finding goes to this fine gentlemen.

CHEF-KOCH
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Why, even FOSS needs support. See OBS Studio, Wikipedia etc. Without supports good projects go to waste.

  • Developers can decide to introduce it in their apps or not. I am sure not every QT developer will adopt this.
  • People will be able to opt-in, opt-out. I am pretty sure they provide us with an option.
  • Most people do not donate, so an additional income thing could help.
  • The other option would be crypto.

We are not talking about MS who introduce ads in Explorer which need some ad-blocking, hosts or registry hacks. Linux is more transparent and there will be options to control this.

Do I like it, nope. But it is better than alternatives to shutdown project because lack of funding or struggling to expand because only few people are willingly to donate.

Sure, I understand that people need money, I just think it’s a patch to a bigger issue that’s not solving anything, I don’t think we should be putting advertisement in the most unimaginable of places there are, it’s just sick.

CHEF-KOCH
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I understand that you are upset, because annoying ads are always bad. However, I think if that is optional via opt-in it maybe, maybe can help smaller developers assuming the ads are well played.

I use Brave + ads enabled and I do not mind a small mini popup. Sometimes I see some news because of that which I reshare, so it actually helps me. What I want to say is, that when ads are well placed and not annoying or malwaretised I see not much issue to place them in an app as long it is not privacy invasive, I think that is the real challenge here. Because ads have a history of malwaretising. Brave fights this by filtering ads trough their proxy, there is a review for every new ad provider. I see here the issue with a normal unfiltered app, imagine your 8 years old kid gets a XXX ad or clicks on malware stuff.

THAT is what I am worried about.

Yeah, that’s also an issue, and sure opt in ads are not that bad since it’s probably one or two clicks away and they’re gone, as long as it doesn’t get like the Android ecosystem where everything you download that’s not from F-droid is basically an ad hell where every part of the GUI is used to display something or pop up something when you’re using it.

I think in an ideal world, the government should have to fund this, to some degree or other, because at the end of the day the world depends on open source software, and the solution is neither to make it closed source or something inherently wrong with open source, it’s just ravaging capitalism. If governments would stop using shitty Windows and pay some money to Linux+GNOME+KDE+etc they would save some money and also give funding.

CHEF-KOCH
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I do not like to blame someone but the major issue I see is not that we got such system, the major issue is that we have not much alternatives. The ones we already got have a history of abuse…

  • Crypto background mining, The PirateBay did this in the past, you could set an amount of CPU power to mine for them, the idea might be good but without any control the abuse level is too high. People use such system today to mine coins to make cash, mostly in malware apps.
  • Traditional ads, for lots of people annoying. The thing is most system do not place ads very well and they tend to be then annoying. I would not mind to see an Lemmy ad here and then to useful new posts.
  • Crypto. Some people like it, others do not, same like donations most average users maybe do it once, maybe twice and that is it, so at the end you need constantly to beg for donations or and crypto which then is like an traditional ad, annoying. See the HUGE Wikipedia banner each year.

So the issue I see is that we have only handful alternatives, and all of them have downsides. No one ever came up with another solution, and this is what we get now.

I think in an ideal world, the government should have to fund this…

I partially agree here. My idea was that crypto becomes mainstream and that your bank and or the govt regulates crypto in general, bans mining and provide us with basically a crypto PayPal system, but more private and climate neutral. However, this is sadly not the case.

I get your logic but I know lots of people reject the idea of giving the govt. more control over things, we also have a history of abuse here.

Personally I say we need better alternatives + the banking systems + govt and the user should get a better and more up2date banking system which also allows some sort of micro-donation system. It would be easy if you just setup in your normal bank account a fund for project x and then control your micro-transactions, so you only have to trust your bank, which you anyway already do because you have your normal bank account there + the govt would be happy because they might still see transactions or your bank needs to report things like fraud, yearly reports etc.

But this hits now a bit off-topic. My main points are that current systems suck and that the crypto problem is not solved and because of this we see - sadly - traditional ads systems, once again.

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