Nepomuk – Fundraiser


After all those “expose the Nepomuk development to the community more” semantic save posts I have to admit to an ulterior motive.

In the last months I have not been paid. It has been, and still is, an uncertain situation with an uncertain future in which I was still hoping that Mandriva would recover from their financial problems. But slowly hope and savings are running low.

Since I see a golden future for the semantic desktop in general and Nepomuk in particular I would prefer to continue working on it instead of choosing some other unrelated job. There was great progress in Nepomuk in the last months, the community grows, and the system design is nearly matured. My departing from the project would essentially stop the development since I am still the only one working full-time on Nepomuk and having a deep knowledge of every part of the system.

Thus, if you think the semantic desktop is worth the effort, if you are interested in feature like semantic desktop search, sharing of relations between people, projects, events, files, emails, if you want the semantic save come to life, if you want Plasma Active to distance itself from the rest through powerful features exposed in Contour, if you want to browse files independent of physical folders, if you want to save snippets of web pages, pdfs, images, and others, annotate and tag them, if you want the system to adopt to contextual changes and previous usage patterns, if you want to organize your work the way your brain works then please support my work on Nepomuk.

Now I find myself in a position where I need to ask for your help to get me through this dry spell. Until I figure out a way to support the work on Nepomuk with or without Mandriva I have to depend on your donations.


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57 thoughts on “Nepomuk – Fundraiser

  1. the problem is, with paypay kicking wikileaks years ago, i quit my paypay account :(

    perhaps add some android/ios donate-app for xx€ or i dont know what else – think everythin else is complicated

  2. I have worked with Nepomuk over the last couple months and I’ve seen what can be done with it. The potential in KDE is so great that letting this project die would be like shooting KDE in the leg (which would be plain silly in these times).

    I’m happy to support the development (although my contribution will probably get you just a pizza and a beer) and I’m hoping some bigger Mandriva-class sponsor will eventually show up.

    Keep up the great work!

  3. I’d happily donate something regularly, being fortunate enough to afford it these days. And I’ve been telling myself for quite some time that I should do more than juste condume all this free software.
    And I am also think that Nepomuk is (part of) what makes the difference for KDE software. I would love it if more applications more visibly jumped in.

    Anyway, as others, I would donate via Paypal if nothing else, but only if nothing else…

  4. Hi.

    Firstly, thank you for amazing work on K3b in the past.

    Secondly, I was hoping that this day will come. Don’t get me wrong. it’s not about your financial problems, but a question mark on the Nepomuk development…

    Why? Simple. We now heve KDE SC 4.7 and still Nepomuk is not in good shape. Think how many users KDE have lost beacuse this ( and Akonadi… but this topic is about Nepomuk)? You have admitted, that you are the only one that working full-time on Nepomuk. Mayby is reason for this.

    You think someone will entrust his data, to project, which is incompatible with all others, crashy, and developed by one person? Please…

    Even Google is able to admit, that some projects are failures.

    I wish you would find well-paid project.

    Sorry for my bad english.

    Now you can thumb down my post, because you propobly also tired of complaining about state of Nepomuk.

    • You are simply a jerk. Rude, ill-mannered, insensitive jerk. And no amount of flowery “I like what you did back when” and “don’t get me wrong” can cover up the galling insensitivity of your comment.

    • I have to agree with you to an extent. I’ve been using KDE 4.x for a long time now and I still fail to see the advantage of Nepomuk. I always know where to find my files, which defeats the use of Nepomuk. Nepomuk also requires me to tag stuff for it to be useful, which consumes too much time and is not something which I want to do. While tagging might be the most user-visible feature, all the other possible use cases mentioned here – http://nepomuk.kde.org/discover/user – are not interesting to me either. However, I’m not sure we should call Nepomuk a failure. At this moment I consider it unnecessary as well, but who knows what the future brings.

      I also agree that a possible loss of KDE users might have been caused by Nepomuk. The impression I get is that Nepomuk merely uses resources without giving useful features in return, that it is bloat, unnecessary. It is also a relatively new, experimental project which was included in KDE, which led to some annoyance due to some nasty bugs in Nepomuk in the past. And while Nepomuk can be disabled, it apparently is so interwoven in KDE that we get warning (arguably, ‘nag’) messages when we decide to have it disabled. All of this worries me to a great deal. While I think Akonadi was a good decision on the part of the KDE PIM developers based on the information I’ve read about it, I think negatively about Nepomuk.

      Jamboarder, maybe he could have put it more diplomatically, but all he does is give severe criticism. He wrote that he does not intend to insult anybody. Also consider that people who do not have a sufficient command of English as he admits might have difficulty expressing themselves in the language and that it can easily lead to misunderstandings in discussions on the Internet. Maybe you should just take him on his word if he writes he means no harm, even if you think he should have expressed his criticism in a more polite way?

      You’re acting like the pot calling the kettle black. You’re the only one insulting others here. If you have think he was wrong in his comment, maybe it would have been better to merely use the word ‘insensitive’ to describe it without using the word ‘jerk’?

  5. Hi Sebastian,

    I hope you can find a solution. What about SUSE ? They are still profitable (?) and already have some kde guys. You could be a perfect fit coming from another (rpm) distribution :)

    I’d prefer something else than paypal, too. If you’re in europe, an international bank transfer is free.
    I’m going to donate a little anyway, Nepomuk is the future :)

    Best of luck and have a good day!
    Gaël

  6. I tired to donate using my GSoC card. but it says

    “You cannot use this credit card for this transaction. Please use another funding source.
    You will need to add and confirm your bank account. Once your bank account has been added and confirmed, you can continue this payment. Add your bank account information below. ”

    I don’t have any other credit card or international back account. Is there any other method by which I can send my donation?

    • Even though I’ve been pessimistic about the usefulness of Nepomuk in my previous post, I do have respect for the effort you have put into your work on it and I would like to help with a small donation. Could you please send your BIC and IBAN to me as well?

      But I do not understand why you don’t want to publish your BIC and IBAN on your blog? How could anyone abuse that data? The only thing they could be used for is to transfer money to your bank account, right? Or am I missing something?

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  9. Hi,

    I made a small donation, can’t help you more because I’m starting my own business and I’m in a situation similar to yours (f*** money).

    Anyway, I like nepomuk so much, it’s a pillar of KDE for me…
    So many years that I see people critizise your work :( I think a lot of people don’t understand the potential of nepomuk.
    I want to see nepomuk everywhere, bookmarks, projects, activities, smart relations between the whole, as an extension of my brain…
    What happened with all the GSOC projects using nepomuk ? Still waiting :/

    Thanks for your work ! Hope you will work full time on semantic desktop and that the semantic’s team will grow :)

    (sorry for poor english)

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  11. I’m afraid I have lost sight of what nepomuk is supposed to be about. Are there any tutorials on how it supposed to work? Perhaps a site that details how we can use Nepomuk would be helpful.

    Why? Because with every KDE release, I try Nepomuk, and it does nothing for me, except causes notifications about how it is being deactivated to save resources, or that it has crashed, or that it is taking up 99% of my CPU. Finally, I disable it altogether.

    On the other hand, I do get excited about it when people talk about it. So I see that there is something great in mind, but I don’t understand what I am supposed to do with it, or how I can use it, and so on

    Keep in mind that I am not a developer myself, only a user, so telling me that I must install KDE 4.something.in.the.future does not do me much good. I’d like to know what is useful about Nepomuk right now, and why it is still something that people seem the believe can be developed into usefulness.

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  14. By the moment all what can I do is to share this notice in every forum I visit, cause I don’t have a job , ergo, I don’t have money, but maybe spreading the notice should help. At the moment I can help with more than words, I will help nepomuk project, cause I really like it.

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