KDE President Lydia Pintscher on the Role of a Nonprofit in Open Sourc

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KDE President Lydia Pintscher on the Role of a Nonprofit in Open Source Development

 

Lydia Pintscher started contributing to KDE in 2006 as a computer science student. She’s now the president of the KDE e.V., the nonprofit that oversees the legal and financial needs of the open source project.

 

 

KDE is among the biggest open source projects which continues to innovate and evolve with the changing times. Often we have seen this particular community create technologies ahead of its time which were later adopted by other projects.

 

What makes KDE (K Desktop Environment) different, is that it is not directly related to any major company by 'blood'. KDE is driven by community which, unlike many similar projects, has a very strong presence in the European market. It also continues to prove that community

alone can create sustainable and innovative products.

 

We talked to Lydia Pintscher, the president of the KDE e.V., the nonprofit organization that oversees the legal and financial aspects of the KDE project, to understand the relationship between the community and the organization. We also discussed the challenge of recruiting more women to open source projects and women in the KDE community.

 

A Brief history of Lydia

 

Pintscher started contributing to KDE way back in 2006 when she was studying computer science. She was a KDE software user and felt like it was made for her. In her words, "I was hooked."

 

The KDE community is among the most friendly and inclusive communities. Pintscher recalls, "When I started contributing, I met amazing people and was hooked again. I am at home here. These are my people. Since then, I've been able to do so many things inside KDE - community management, marketing, user support, release management, product management, running mentoring programs and now leading a non-profit. I don't think this would have been possible for me anywhere else.

 

"This is the most amazing thing for me about KDE: you can come here and learn and grow to do things you didn't think you were capable of," she said. "And of course we are doing great free software that empowers millions of people along the way."

 

 

What's KDE e.V?

 

KDE is a huge, and extremely prolific community. Much like the Linux Foundation provides support to the Linux community and other open source projects, a structured organization is needed to manage KDE's huge community which is spread across the globe and driven by thousands of developers.

 

This extremely diverse community is governed by KDE e.V. which was co-founded by Matthias Ettrich, the founder of the KDE project, back in 1997............

 

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