KDE Nears 30th Anniversary With Contributors and Commits Trending Up

In a post cited by Slashdot, Ottens said the 30-year graph of the number of contributors peaks around an average of 180 people, sometimes nearing 200, then shrinks to a bottom around an average of 110 people in 2017. Since then, two major events occurred: in 2018 the community picked its first set of KDE Goals, one of which was 'Streamlined onboarding of new contributors,' and the transition to GitLab was fully delivered early in the second quarter of 2020.

Ottens said team size now appears to average around 140 people, closer to the all-time high in 2010 but not fully closing the gap. Commit count, however, is much closer to the 2010 level with somewhat fewer people. He said KDE even had an all-time high commit count in 2023, surpassing any other week since the project was created. Trends at the end of the plot point upward, and he wrote that 2026 looks like it will be a very good year, with hope that growth stays stable and the community becomes the biggest it has ever been.

Looking specifically at KDE Plasma, Ottens said the 2010 dip is much less dramatic than in other plots. It stabilized more quickly and kept an almost identical team size, followed by an increase leading up to 2020. Plasma, he said, is clearly one of the projects that benefited most from the GitLab transition; its average team size almost doubled during the transition. He suggested this likely explains the increase seen across KDE as a whole but not in applications. Like the rest of KDE, he wrote, 2026 will be a very good year for Plasma, and he wondered whether it will double in size again next year compared with 2020.

Ottens concluded that he is rather happy KDE as a whole seems very healthy. He said that in almost 30 years KDE built a great community and many awesome products, and gave kudos to all people involved over the past 30 years. Even those no longer involved helped contribute something beautiful and precious to the world, he wrote, describing KDE as living proof that large commons can be created and made sustainable thanks to passionate people.