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.