 I don't know if you know babyvogway the youtuber but he made a video explaining what does he think a community company is and why he thinks that kitty isn't one and when I first read the comments like kitty isn't a community company written by him I was like what I mean what is that and he did a video explaining so I wanted to go through the video give my impressions of what I agree with what I don't agree with and then explain why yes kitty is fully a company project so let's get to it and for being a true community you need to be organized and be a legal entity by the way if you didn't know kitty is a legal entity but not exactly kitty there is a separate organization which is called kitty ev which is what represents the kitty community from a legal point of view so in this case we're very much talking about the relationship between kitty and the kitty ev which is the legal company to be in control and of course to develop and create so this is a movie giving some context about what a community company should look like to be qualified as a true community company which apparently kitty is not let's get to in this version 0.1 of the manifest so expect changes and after reading you the manifest I'm gonna share some thoughts that you're not gonna like true all right let's do this maybe we're starting with what a community company is and I haven't published yet some form note please that the subtitle is towards mostly to linux foundation like kitty and gnome so this is actually for kitty so I think it's very reasonable for kitty people to reply to this normal statute but in simple terms is a profit non ownership company controlled by its members which kitty by the way totally complies with that definition kitty is a non profit yeah it says profit kitty is a non profit it's not meant to make money and we do have limitations but also tax benefits for being a non profit and so we have the manifest which is the basic requirements a company should fulfill to be qualified as a community company and the very first requirement is that the board of directors should be consistent and elected by community members now how does this work in kitty so kitty as the evi as I've said and in order to be an evi member you ask to become a part of the evi and then there is an election inside of the evi voting for whether to include you or not in the evi 99% of the times you get included without any problem if you have contributed to kitty when you're inside the kitty evi every um thought number of years there is an election for actually the board which is the few people like five or six which actually control the evi and those are elections within kitty evi members so yes in this case it's totally elected by community members but the members of board of directors cannot work or be paid by a non community company with competitive in this case kitty I think doesn't have any explicit rule against that but usually when somebody asks to be elected to the kitty evi they get asked if they work for competitive projects and usually if they do they are not elected but as far as I know there's no explicit rule about it I don't think it's strictly necessary I think that common sense in the voters should be enough projects in this regard gnome foundation is a non community company because it is basically led by employees of uh I think that this basically leads to a much more complex discussion however I'm totally not an expert of what the gnome foundation board of director is so I'll just leave it to gnome people I'm just going to talk about kitty companies with competitive products a community company has an a traditional board of directors the bot is extended both in size and duties and should also involve the lead developers and engineers of companies projects in here I think that there is either I'm I could call it a misunderstanding or at least that's not how kitty works and I don't think this is any better than how kitty works so the board of directors of kitty is only worried for legal stuff because that's the evi evi is legally representing kitty community but it's only legal stuff or you know managing relations with other companies when it comes to technical technical things technical things are discussed in the open in like kitty in the git lab instances and they're discussed with whoever wants to come there and discuss the board of director is not like should not have the power of seeing how the technology should be implemented because that's up to the developers and the developers should discuss it in the open regardless of who is in the board of director so in this case kitty evi board of director is only about legal the legal entity and the development is brought forward from the from the developers regardless of the board of directors and honestly I don't think that's bad that means that in a community company it is very essential that the bot members to get paid by the company kitty this doesn't happen the board of director is not paid by the kitty foundation it would to some extent be conflict of interest because such thing would probably be needed to be implemented by the board of director themselves so they would be like okay now we get paid and that's it and since they are only represented the legal side of it I think it's more important to pay for developer firsts community members shouldn't only be active but also regular contributors an important objective of a community company isn't to grow its community constantly reforming it this totally happens in kitty the members of the evi but in general of kitty are contributors by definition basically and they also only get really voted inside of kitty evi if they're contributors but I mean all of those people who ask to be in the kitty evi are contributors so yeah this totally applies also membership cannot gain by donations because money shouldn't generate money yeah in kitty in order in order to be part of the kitty evi you ask to be part of it or your contribute to kitty and it's not about donations at all money a community company should release on an open model both for software and hardware kitty totally fulfills this one everything that's made by kitty is open source and the hardware we work with like pine 64 to make sure that it's as open as we can make it to be so yeah because that's the only way to attract new contributors and grow bigger a community company should release community projects and for doing so very often is appropriate to use software or hardware by other companies but it is very essential to develop control and leave the crucial parts of their stack in this regard kde foundation isn't a community company because due to the extended okay so this is controversial as a best and wrong at war so uh first of all it says that qt is a proprietary toolkit which is false qt is an open source toolkit it is open source there's no like doubt about it all of the code from qt is open source there are open source open source licenses to use it so it's not proprietary that's just wrong also the idea that it should control and develop their main parts of the stack is uh it doesn't make any sense because if you're doing like at desktops all of the applications there's only a certain amount of things that you can control downstream which is under the hood so the toolkit maybe you can try to control it but that's hard already and then there's also even lower stuff like the compiler like all of kitty projects rely heavily on the fact that they have to be compiled but it's not like we can control the c++ compiler that's just not going to happen and that's just an example there are hundreds of very big projects that kitty rely on to exist like qt but also see a g plus gcc gcc how it's pronounced the c++ compiler or cmake as an another example obviously that that's not an issue because it's normal to rely on projects especially open source kitty mostly i think only relies on open source projects really then i think the only issue that baby evogua is trying to bring up that is that a community's software project should only rely on projects that are fully open source uh qt is fully open source there's also a qt releases for like companies but we use the open source ones so no and maybe qt technically speaking is not a community software you can't join qt just because you want to but i mean you cannot rely only on software made by community software so i really don't see the point here so it's normal to rely on other software and as far as as long as the software is open source it's fine qt is not a threat to qt to kitty baby evogua is like super worried about this even wrote me private privately i try to explain him that qt is not going to kill kitty in any means qt is not like an avial company that's trying to destroy us we actually have a relationship with qt we have like a board um a working group that manages the relationship between kitty and qt qt is releasing uh open source cuties is being released sorry as open source so everything is fine it just made this up qt use plasmas in a community project even if qt went crazy and decided to make everything close source from now on kitty will still survive without any issue because what we have currently of qt is already open source you can't close down what you've already open sourced so we'll would just fork it and continue on backfixing kitty developers right now already contribute to kitty with sorry too qt with backfixes so even if we had to fork it we would and we would do fine a community company is eligible for taking loans from banks are buying buildings for their activities but they can't hold assets that aren't related to their business like shares of other companies yeah i mean kitty doesn't have any shares of other companies or such things so no issue there a community company is only in fully owned by yourself makes sense although there is a virtual sharing system that each member owns exactly one share and profits are distributed equally yeah this one doesn't work that's not how it works because if the the profit that's made by a company is never like distributed equally to all members as far as open source goes all of the money is managed to as an example funding group which decides together how to use the money we all decide together how to use the money we don't just give part of it to each member that would be like that wouldn't make sense like you use the money you get to hire developers you don't just give 100 euros to all of the members and say okay now can we give it back so we can hire somebody member the biggest challenge of a community company is to give motivation and encouraging personal initiatives for her members salaries aside the community company should provide a fair mechanism to award the contributors that accomplish yeah kitty kind of has these things as an example we do have rewards for people inside of kitty that contributes to certain aspects of it every year in academy there is this giving the rewards and that's actually encouraging for people of course it's not like money prizes because that would mean that you would people would try to convince people to make them give the money to them that's not how you deal with money but we do have a reward system the most I distributing a large percentage of their annual profits to a small percentage of their no that's not how you manage money that wouldn't work that that would be a mess and that would create so many political tensions because I can assure you 100% that people would complain about people would say that those people those small percentage sorry of people that would get a larger percentage of profits they would say that they are like convincing the board to give the money to them without actually doing enough and there will be a lot of discussion about it and it just wouldn't work that's not how you deal with the money in a community project you make all of the money go to a working group that manages it and then they make proposals on how to spend it and then they all get voted together but you don't just give money a lot of money to certain developers because you think they have done enough because that would generate years of discussions that just wouldn't work let's keep in mind that baby boy never actually was never actually a part an active part of any community projects and I think that in moments like this it shows because he never actively contributed to like kt plasma or gnome for a good period of time is from the outside criticizing these companies but being from the inside you realize that things are not as easy as they seem furthermore the community company can also buy innovation and expand by acquiring non-community companies as long as they return them to community another thing is that a community company can be split yeah these are details but they all make sense obviously two community companies can be merged to one for example gnome could be merged with mozilla foundation this just doesn't make i'm sorry this just doesn't it's so unrealistic it's so unrealistic that it just doesn't make any sense it's not an example it's a fan fiction it it just won't happen gnome and mozilla are completely different projects doing completely different stuff with completely different ways of working inside of them mozilla is not a community company we know that like mozilla is a company it's a profit company who tries to make profit who work in a certain way it's not like you can join mozilla development like it has developers gnome is not like that it's a community project a community company sorry they completely different things they can't just merge and this thing that gnome needs a browser and a cloud no it doesn't and firefox needs an operating system desktop or it will die no that's just not how it works like this is so crazy so gnome could gain a web browser and cloud infrastructure and firefox could gain an operating it's not like if you join with firefox then whoa cloud infrastructure out of the no and gnome i mean you could you can already use firefox in gnome that's being system that is crucial for their existence and by the way i'm planning another movie on that yeah it's a dream it's a fan fiction that's just not going to happen and finally a community company should never be too big to fail in a healthy ecosystem existing community companies could die but new community companies would be born and continue where others left because weird but okay because eventually community will prevail very weird but okay unless if ai prevails first a community of robots then many robots but a single a okay this is where the video completely gets like out of topic i think i've already said enough i think that baby vogue really shows that he doesn't know what he's talking about most of the time when he talks about being part of a community company and when he says that mozilla like needs our desktop or it will die and then it's because of that it should like join with gnome that that's just a crazy