Has anybody put any real effort into finding a sponsor for KDEnlive?

The most obvious and likely sources of sponsorship would be Novell, Canonical, Red Hat, Mandriva or IBM. I've got a feeling that Novell would be the most likely out of those as they're more of a KDE distro than Ubuntu or Fedora/RHEL which are primarily GNOME. It might also be worth trying some of the big electronics/video companies like Sony, Samsung, Panansonic, Canon and JVC etc.

Ardour is sponsored by SAE (School of Audio Engineering) and k3b is sponsored by Mandriva and Lacie - KDEnlive is every bit as important to the world of FOSS multimedia as those two apps whilst not being as feature complete. Mandriva should also be VERY interested in seeing an improved, 1.0 worthy KDEnlive as they also seem to prefer KDE over GNOME.

I really want to see KDEnlive's development accelerate and get a real good, stable video editor released in time for the next Ubuntu. Why? Because I'm totally sick of these "Is this the year of the Linux Desktop" articles where you can guarantee people always end up saying two things:

1) Linux multimedia is poor (total lie or plain ignorance, normally because they tried a distro that didn't include the necessary codecs/libs by default)

2) There's no good video editors for Linux and I don't like/ can't understand Cinelerra's interface

If 0.6 didn't get released in time for the next Ubuntu then people would have to compile their own KDEnlive and the chances of decent desktop linux adoption will be delayed another 6 months or so.

Yes, I know there are other, arguably better distro's than Ubuntu but it is by far the most popular and thus is the first thing people new to Linux will try and so if KDEnlive doesn't work out-of-the-box its is a fail- Linux newbies don't compile, they re-install XP.

I think some TVs or producers would be interested in sponsoring Kdenlive.

It depends what you mean by "sponsoring" and how much money is involved.

If JB creates some kind of legal organisation in Switzerland,

I am ready to tour the French broadcasters, TV producers

to collect some kind of money.

Then we could propose real bounties with real money.

I heard back from Mark Shuttleworth today- he wishes the project well but is unable to provide sponsorship. I'm still awaiting a proper response from Novell and I've not heard anything from Mandriva yet.

Yes of course, TV and video companies are probably just as likely to want to see KDEnlive succeed and so we should try contacting them next.

If we did find a serious sponsor, would JB or any of the other devs be able to work on it full-time, if they were being paid sufficiently? I should imagine all the devs have jobs but some jobs are more flexible than others.

Any comments JB?

Before looking for sponsorship, you should ask BEFORE if core leaders are interested.

I'm sorry if I've upset anyone just by trying too hard to help! Anyway, I posted my question about sponsorship for exactly that reason. I waited a few days before writing to ask about sponsorship as I was pretty certain jb had seen the first posting in this thread as he had been on these boards and replied to other threads in the mean time. So, I took the dev teams' silence as consent, thinking the KDEnlive devs saw my attempts as futile and not really worth responding to.

Have I caused any harm to the project? Not that I'm aware. Have I created more interest in the project? I believe so!