Re: A sad state of affairs

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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.

Related Links

·   Articles on KDE Official News
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Re: A sad state of affairs
by bert on Saturday 07/Jul/2007, @07:52

but the fact that the 4.0 release cycle took so long is a point of concern. You really cannot wait so long for a new release.

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Re: A sad state of affairs
by Foxy on Saturday 07/Jul/2007, @08:03

We were waiting for Mathematica 6.0 for two years. So what? Now we get a qualitatively better product. Was there a need for hurry? I highly doubt it. KDE 4.0 will be released when it's ready, and it will be beautiful. For now, KDE 3.5.x is not that bad.;)

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Re: A sad state of affairs
by Leo S on Saturday 07/Jul/2007, @09:27

KDE 3.5.x is already miles better than anything else available, on Linux or elsewhere, so there is no big hurry :)

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Re: A sad state of affairs
by Sutoka on Saturday 07/Jul/2007, @08:32

Don't forget that 3.5 releases have been going on until very recently, in fact a version just came out not that long ago. If that is indeed the last KDE 3 release that means we'll only have to wait about 3 months for KDE 4.0 (assuming the release date doesn't slip). If 6 months is considered a 'fast' release cycle, why is about 3 months between the last 3.5 release and 4.0 considered too long?

It will definitely be worth the wait as well!

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Re: A sad state of affairs
by James Richard Tyrer on Saturday 07/Jul/2007, @19:27

Might I first suggest here that being overly pessimistic or cheerleading are probably both bad ideas. What we need is realism.

I read an article in Communications last year about why Open Software projects fail (e.g. die) which would tend to indicate that they have a tendency to die. Realism would be recognizing that this is always a possibility and taking proactive measures to prevent it. This is much better than saying how great things are when there are always things that can be improved.

Yes, the roadmap for KDE-4 was a bit drastic. This has resulted in a long development cycle and I don't really expect that it will be suitable to replace KDE-3 until 4.1.1 is released. It would have been better to simultaniously continue with 3.6, but we have two issues there: (1) we don't seem to have enough people, (2) we have an attitude problem (I was told that continuing to work on KDE-3 was counter-productive [that means that it is harmful] -- well, I can hardly get KDE-4 to run; much too unstable to work on).

And so it goes. KDE is not becoming the best thing since sliced bread and it isn't dying anytime soon. Still, we need to continue to work to improve the way that we do things to prevent any decline because software can often be "Red Queen" (you have to run as fast as you can to stay in the same place -- to avoid falling behind). That seems to be the way it is with bugs and we really need to find a way to have successive releases more and more stable as we progress into the future, and this doesn't seem to be what is happening. This is where I see a slight danger of the project slowly dying.

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Re: A sad state of affairs
by Ben on Sunday 08/Jul/2007, @00:00

>I read an article in Communications last year about why Open Software projects fail (e.g. die) which would tend to indicate that they have a tendency to die.

I can't comment on this artical as I haven't read it, but from my, adminatdly anacdoctal experience, what happens is around 80% of open soruce products never get anywhere (because 80% of anything fails, or sucks). Those that get big tend to survive for a long time.

>It would have been better to simultaniously continue with 3.6, but we have two issues there

Any work done on 3.6 would be mostly ignored if KDE 4.0 is out. Developers would be relitively uninterested since they cant use all the cool new libs created for 4.0, and as soon as 4.1.1 is out it will all that effort would be forgotten. However I think they do plan bugfix releases for 3.5 for a bit longer past KDE4

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Re: A sad state of affairs
by scratching my head on Sunday 08/Jul/2007, @04:22

<i>"from my, adminatdly anacdoctal experience, what happens is around 80% of open soruce products never get anywhere"</i>

And how many *commercial* products do never get anywhere??

What? You don't know??

I'll tell ya': it's nearly 90%.

Of course you never hear about them.

Because their design, inception, coding is done behind closed doors.

Lots of money being poured in.

But then, somewhere on their way to a shipping-worth product the management discovers that the market does not need it, that the software has too heavy design flaws, that the competition was faster and dominates everything already, $some-other-reason...

If you think that in the commercial world of software development the majority of closed source products you need to inhabit a different world from this one next time you live. Maybe there you find the Wonderland you imagine....

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Re: A sad state of affairs
by Artem S. Tashkinov on Saturday 07/Jul/2007, @08:33

A nice link, indeed, BUT how many of these titles are available for Linux?

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Re: A sad state of affairs
by AC on Sunday 08/Jul/2007, @07:41

If you mean the above link to Trolltech's "list of customers" - that's not a list of software titles which could be "available for Linux". It's not even a list of companies that (exclusively) develop software for external sale to the public. (Which seems like an odd metric for the "success" or death of an open software project, but you kind of implied earlier that that's what you're interested in using.)

It's a list of companies that use the Qt toolkit, which brief capsule summaries of how those companies are using that toolkit. As was plainly stated in the post that provided the link in the first place: "the list of vendors who use the QT widgets in their commercial products".

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