KDE Again Operated at a Loss During 2023
phoronix.com
phoronix.com
As Arnt point's point's out, this was not unfortunate. It was intentional, necessary and calculated. See the report itself (https://ev.kde.org/reports/ev-2023/#welcome-to-kdes-annual-r...)
[edit] found it under Financial Working Group
This says they need to spend down their reserves because they are a non-profit? Is there some particular rule in the jurisdiction they are incorporated in where non-profits can't maintain large reserves? A lot of non-profits in the US are funded primarily from investment proceeds from endowments.
It has a lot of flexibility wrt what level of reserves are sensible in its case or when to spend received donations, but the taxman will ask when that money is going to be spent.
> Our annual income for 2023 came in just slightly below our projections, with a small difference of less than 500€.
This is a nonissue.
They were getting too much money in donations so they purposefully hired a bunch more employees to soak up the increase in funding they had. This is a great problem to have.
Why?
"It was intended to run at a loss this year.
We had loads of money from donations that wasn't spent on travel during the pandemic. This has been the case for a few years, we're a non profit, we're not allowed to have huge surpluses in the bank by eV laws.
Now we are deliberately over spending with developer hires, we will long term have to build donations to sustain that new level but it's not a problematic situation."
Both outcomes demonstrate our ability to make accurate forecasts — an important ability given our 2023 operational goal of outspending our annual income for the second year in a row, which we have achieved, in order to reduce our financial reserve (which remains high from large one-time donations in earlier years) in accordance with our non-profit organizational form."
A German e.V. can't keep arbitrarily large reserves indefinitely. It needs to use its money for its stated purpose, or else it may lose its tax status. KDE's plan makes sense.