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A sad state of affairs
by Artem S. Tashkinov on Saturday 07/Jul/2007, @06:47
Let me express my point of view.

I don't really care about "Their exceptional financial commitment to the KDE e.V. helps the project with community events, infrastructure and developer meetings" because for more than ten years we can successfully and effectively communicate over the web.

What KDE really needs is developers. IMO, Intel and Novell should have hired ten full time active developers and that would greatly improve the pace of development and overall quality of the project.

Right now (judging from KDE commit digests) KDE has only _ten_ active developers. It makes me feel disappointed. Consider more than three hundred developers who worked just on Vista user interface.

Don't get me wrong, but I see KDE project slowly dying. The main cause of that is the strict conditions of Qt library license. Most ISV want to cut their expenses when there's a talk about porting their software from Windows to Linux. So far, we see that most distros and ISV have chosen LGPL'ed GTK library. I know only two (!) commercial software pieces based on Qt: Opera and Parallels Workstation. Other software has been built over GTK/Motif/wxWidgets/etc.
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Re: A sad state of affairs
by Henrik Pauli on Saturday 07/Jul/2007, @07:15
Skype for Linux is Qt, and so is Google Earth. And, apparently, Adobe and Autodesk use it too.

wx is probably the best choice for those coming from Windows with an already done piece of software they want to port to other systems, as wx is the "most native" there. Gtk looks very out of place on Windows, so unless someone comes from a non-KDE linux background, I doubt they would decide on it. Motif? Don't be ridiculous, you must be talking about software made a decade ago.

But I think this all has nothing to do with "KDE dying". We have many people working on KDE &| Qt software... most of those don't meddle with the affairs of the KDE core though, but hey. In my case that's simply because I prefer not to mess around with C++ when possible (and when much more modern languages are available).
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Re: A sad^Wexcellent state of affairs
by Sebastian Kügler on Saturday 07/Jul/2007, @07:32
> Don't get me wrong, but I see KDE project slowly dying.

You should've checked better on the aKademy news. KDE is alive and kicking like it has never been before, and meeting each other physically is a cornerstone for good collaboration. And there were a lot of Novell who work on KDE here as well.

Ow well, I'll not further shoot down your points, but I'd recommend getting informed first, and then posting doom scenarios which are far from the truth.
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Re: A sad state of affairs
by insulae on Saturday 07/Jul/2007, @07:40
no no, are many commercial software pieces based on QT: Skype, VirtualBox, Google Earth (the last version i don't know), Last.fm, etc.
the GTK always were free, QT version for Windows Not but now yes, you must wait a little time QT and KDE are going to be the best option to make free software, the QT library and the QT tools like Kdevelop are the best!.

Congratulation to the KDE team, Intel and Novell (break "the diabolic pact" with microsoft :) )

Grettings
insulae
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Re: A sad state of affairs
by Foxy on Saturday 07/Jul/2007, @07:48
Birdie, stop gasifying the pools, please. Here is the list of vendors who use the QT widgets in their commercial products,
http://trolltech.com/customers/directory

Gosh, just mentioning Wolfram's Mathematica 6.0 would be sufficient.

Besides, that is especially ridiculous to call KDE a 'dying project' right before the 4.0 release. 4.2, kiso.
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Re: A sad state of affairs
by Kevin Krammer on Saturday 07/Jul/2007, @08:04
> Right now (judging from KDE commit digests) KDE has only _ten_ active developers.

You do understand the concept of a "top ten" list, don't you?

If you look at the summary you'll see something like

"Commits: 2508 by 243 developers..."

Almost 250 active contributors in the respective week.
And all of them improve the KDE experience, either by writing code, fixing bugs, adding translations, improving documentation, beautifying artwork, etc
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Re: A sad state of affairs
by Stu Warsnap on Monday 09/Jul/2007, @08:14
> Don't get me wrong, but I see KDE project slowly dying.

With google's linux desktop supporting GTK, and now Openmoko also supporting GTK its not hard to think otherwise. GTK's LGPL license starts to show its advantages for companies.
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myth # 1 : companies are porting sw to linux
by v m on Monday 09/Jul/2007, @18:28
The only s/w that gets "ported" in any significant number is J2EE apps - these are x-platform anyway. The others are server-side apps. It is so common to see commercial cos port only the server side of a client-server app. Remaining are some apps, usually insignificant in use or scope, simple enough to be ported or a lousy config app, such as ATI's control centre (after a lot of pressure from FSF/stallman/RH/gnome).

Cos are not porting sophisticated commercial desktop apps to linux, definitely not using GTK because it is a huge pain to do so and not worth the effort. Very little s/w in fact is ported to even OS X, much less linux.

gnome pushers never get tired of lies and FUD, even though they should know from experience that it doesn't help anyone.
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truth about RH, novell, ubuntu, gnome, fsf
by v m on Monday 09/Jul/2007, @18:50
FSF pretty much dictates RH and novell's agenda. FSF has adopted gnome because gnome also uses GTK ( nothing bloats a moron's bean more than stoking his ego).

RH and novell have a lot of people working on gnome - without which gnome wouldn't be where it is today. Sun also has people working on gnome. And so does canonical. Shuttleworth may have thrown crumbs at KDE but he hires people to mostly work on gnome ( as far as desktops go). Check out his job ads.

Novell has retained some of the KDE developers it inherited from SUSE but officially, it tries to be just like RH ( supporting only ext2/3 and gnome). The 'kernel developers' hired by novell and RH are in MA, under the "guidance" of the egomaniac moron stallman. Interesting how novell moved its systems development operations to MA after acquiring SUSE. All these facts can be verified. Also check out job postings by RH and Novell.

This is not gonna change. FSF sets the official linux agenda. And it is gnome. So US cos are gonna push gnome. They will hire gnome developers. It is unfair to rule out KDE because of this. KDE has far more volunteer developers and they are impressive. I live in US and will use KDE as long as I use linux ( I will avoid gnome for the same reason I avoid m$).

Having said this, I think KDE needs to improve in some matters -

Get rid of too many duplicate apps. That used to be a gnome legacy and even they are avoiding that nowadays.

Do not make immature apps part of 'official' packages. The apps included must be complete and professional. For e.g., in games, loose kolf, kasteroids and other garbage.

Don't let the crash handler handle everything. The app should handle an event or exception whenever possible. I have seen too many apps fall thru to the crash handler when even a dependency is unresolved. This is a lazy and unprofessional way of doing it.

This might be a packaging issue ( at the distro level). If KDE apps use non kde apps ( or even other kde apps sometimes), don't make the dependency too strong. If the app/lib it is dependent upon is missing, detect that and inform the user. This makes packaging easier and usability is also improved.

Encourage distros that favour KDE because most of them are struggling. ubuntu does NOT need your help ( and canonical can manage on their own). Help distros such as mandriva, pclinuxos, mepis, knoppix etc. Encourage these distros. Lining up like sheep behind fedora, ubuntu or the next flavour of gnome-based distro is playing right into their hands.
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Re: A sad state of affairs
by Troy Unrau on Tuesday 10/Jul/2007, @10:21
Dude, we had 250 developers at Akademy, and are averaging somewhere on the order of 350 commits per day. I'll have more on this soon once I have concrete numbers to back it up, but it seems like the opposite is true - KDE is innovating.
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