Friday, 19 February 2010

KDE vs the world

There was some brief discussion today in #kde-devel about a very interesting topic that got me thinking: that of commercial interest.

The exact discussion was about MeeGo, and similar projects, which according to some "reinvent" parts of the KDE stack (user experience level, plasma+kwin vs hildon-desktop in current Maemo, and of course much much more), which in their view is a bad thing due to duplicating effort, and lowering focus on KDE due to the employment of KDE hackers on unrelated projects.

I suppose this isn't as hard to understand as it might seem, at least on face value, but when you think that the goal is much wider than *just* KDE, then perhaps it's not as bad as it seems. After all, getting employed to hack on Qt related technologies, regardless of what they are, is surely going to help bring more attention to Qt (and as a heavily interrelated breed, KDE), right? It's also got to be a good thing that projects like these expand the interest, investment, and activity around the whole stack - because KDE and other projects can only gain from more eyes on the whole system. A kick-ass development stack is no good to anyone if it's not being used.

Above all, it should be remembered that diversity is strength, and that's something that shouldn't be sneezed at.
Posted by at 17:10
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5 comments:

  1. I mostly agree.
    Though, even if I understand why they might want to create their own desktop experiences, I surely don't understand why a window manager should be written from scratch when you have a really good one ready for use, full featured, and customizable enough to allow almost every use, that is written with Qt + X11.
    Guess they know what they are doing.
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  2. @Skarn86: the main reason is simply usage differences. kwin, while great, and extensible, is not targetted at small usage scenarios (both in terms of resource usage &etc).

    While it would be possible to hack it up to work as such, it's probably more pragmatic (at least in my view, opinion will differ ;)) than to try shoehorn kwin into mobile usage.

    Then again, I'm all for kwin with a totally different structural design to allow for such usage in the first place. :)
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  3. You taking a discussion from IRC and commenting on it in your blog gives the wrong impression to people, namely that what you describe is common understanding of how the world works. By taking the discussion out of context (by replying on your blog to something someone said on IRC) people might end up getting the impression that KDE wants one unified KDE stack everywhere, for all the wrong reasons.

    It would be good to either be more clear who you refer to, and what exactly they said, because effectively you only leave people puzzled.

    Personally, I feel misrepresented by your blog entry, and I think it's caused by paraphrasing and taking out of context a discussion most of your readers didn't take part in, and will never get to read at all -- not overly useful and actually causing alienation.
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  4. @sebas: misrepresentation is most certainly not my intention, and I'm happy to clarify anything I've said here - either via private mail or IRC, I think that either are better suited for such things than a blog comment. I'm sorry, however, if some part of this has come across in the wrong way - please do take my apologies.

    I deliberately don't name names, because I *don't* know the full extent of the thoughts of other people - but I am happy to acknowledge that my viewpoint is certainly not the only one.

    I'd also like to make it clear here at least (though I will be sure to add such a disclaimer to future postings on rather controversial subjects): What I wrote above is purely that of my own feeling and understanding of things, as are the majority of the pieces I write on here.

    Thanks for taking the time to voice your concerns.
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  5. I completely agree. If this helps to bring commercial, work-related technologies -- like improvements in co-existing with Exchange etc, then it can only be for the better.

    KDE is very mature as a desktop. Now, all it needs is some "commercial", non-fun related push and world domination is complete :)
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