Systemic Altruism
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Justice & public goodsPreliminary editorial review

Krita Foundation

The independent Dutch nonprofit foundation supports Krita development and its creative community. It offers reusable production capacity that public-interest teams can adapt, not an evaluation of every artwork or campaign made with it.

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Systemic Altruism practice potential: 71–81/100
90% of weighted axes reviewed. A mechanism hypothesis, not proven effectiveness or a donation recommendation.

Who this work enables

Tools & support for charities: Reusable digital-painting software and development support can reduce repeated production-tool costs for nonprofit educators and communicators.

Open-source evidence · license checked

  • Krita — GPL-3.0 for the application; compatible per-file terms differ license file. Organization’s role: steward.
    Inspected COPYING and README in KDE’s GitHub mirror; canonical development is on KDE Invent. The independent foundation funds and supports contributors, not sole authorship; plugins, artwork, trademarks and bundled components need separate treatment. License-file snapshot: 94a9ed024d3859793618152ea559a168bbcbb5e2.

License checked 2026-10-27. This is not a security audit, proof of current support or effectiveness, or a promise of free hosting. A sponsor or steward is not necessarily the sole developer. Unchecked profiles are not evidence of closed code. No extra score points are added.

Humanity’s Checklist source match

Gatekeepers · Coordination — editorial, partial alignment.

Shared creative tooling can lower proprietary barriers and coordinate development. This partial match does not make every use a Story intervention or establish audience or community outcomes.

Explicit checklist adoption: not verified. A mechanism match is not an affiliation, endorsement, evidence of effectiveness or a scoring bonus. Read the practice.

Focus classification: 2026-10-27. Based on the organization’s dated official sources below; earlier axis-review dates are unchanged.

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The proposed pathway

Fund and sustain reusable digital-art software and contributor capacity

Six dimensions, with rationale

Structural depth

3 / 4

Shared creative software can reduce vendor dependency and access barriers, but cannot alone change the social institutions using the work.

Institutional reach

3 / 4

A common art tool can enable educators and public-interest communicators, although its institutional breadth is narrower than general-purpose infrastructure.

Durability

3 / 4

Reusable source and contributor skills can persist, with maintenance, platform compatibility and training still needed.

Scalability

4 / 4

A common codebase can be distributed and adapted without each organization building a painting application; creative labor remains costly.

Funding additionality

Unreviewed

No current marginal developer-funding bottleneck or displacement of community and other contributions was audited.

Community agency

Unreviewed

Artist participation and public contribution do not establish binding governance rights for affected communities or downstream audiences.

Evidence and selection

Organization reported; current primary mechanism sources inspected; named repository and license file checked

Illustrative inclusion to examine this mechanism. Inclusion is not an external recommendation or a verified comparative ranking.

A testable next question

Do public-interest teams adopting supported Krita maintain useful creative workflows and meaningful exit options with lower lifecycle costs than comparable teams using existing proprietary tools, including training and support?

Review confidence: Moderate for documented design; low for systemic attribution. The independent Stichting Krita Foundation’s nonprofit support for Krita, not KDE e.V.’s Okular scope, all KDE projects or a judgment of downstream creative content.

What remains uncertain

The foundation page identifies Stichting Krita Foundation in the Netherlands, independent despite Krita’s continuing KDE community relationship. The existing KDE e.V. profile uses Okular and does not count Krita as its own foundation. Krita as a whole is GPL version 3, with compatible per-file and third-party terms; artwork, trademarks and distribution channels are separate. Canonical development is on KDE Invent, not the GitHub mirror. No usability, accessibility, security or nonprofit outcome audit occurred, and creative tools are not charity-exclusive.

Sources to inspect

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Axis review: 2026-10-27 · weighting method v0.2 (2026-10-26) · Method, conflicts and coverage