While it's doubtful you'll see ads in KDE's core applications, it would be possible for distributions that wish to further monetize their work to fork these applications, placing ads in them.
I like to think that they wouldn’t dare. The vast majority of their users care a lot about open source and privacy. The instant KDE starts doing this, someone will fork their codebase and cut out the ads module. If they go proprietary, their community developers will move on to forks, like what happened with MySql and OpenOffice.
I like to think that they wouldn’t dare. The vast majority of their users care a lot about open source and privacy. The instant KDE starts doing this, someone will fork their codebase and cut out the ads module. If they go proprietary, their community developers will move on to forks, like what happened with MySql and OpenOffice.