Intel and Novell Become Patrons of KDE

Intel and Novell have both become corporate Patrons of KDE. Their exceptional financial commitment to the KDE e.V. helps the project with community events, infrastructure and developer meetings. Read on for more information.

For decades, Intel Corporation has developed technology enabling the computer and Internet revolution that has changed the world. Intel has been a strong supporter of KDE and other free software projects in the past, and it continues this effort by becoming a Patron of KDE.

Novell is a global leader in open, enterprise class software and services; it is also the company behind the openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise products. Novell has persistently been among the strongest supporters of KDE by employing many KDE developers and continuously sponsoring events. It now reaffirms its commitment financially by being the first corporate Linux distributor to become a Patron of KDE.

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Comments

by Hannes Hauswedell (not verified)

good to see that you get more money, but please stay independent and dont be afraid to critisize your sponsors when it becomes obvious that freedom is left behind on the path to profit.

by Sebastian Kügler (not verified)

Promised.

I think having more corporate sponsors is good because it shows exactly this independence (which is also a core strength of the KDE community). Not being dependant on one or the other vendor is extremely important to us, and to the way we work.

The reason why Intel and Novell are Patrons of KDE is, assumably, not that they want to influence the KDE community, but that they think that having a functioning community is important for those companies as well, and that being a Patron of KDE is a good way to help the community being effective and develop good and Free software.

by Ben (not verified)

I agree with you're novel statement, I can see KDE4 being highly popular with corporate users (The Semantic Desktop)

I'm not too sure what intel thinks its getting from this, perhaps its genine charity. Either way good on both of you :)

by Mat (not verified)

Intel Classmate PC will use KDE as default linux environment,
(look the screenshot from aKademy Education Day)
so the better is KDE the better will look their project....

by Gerry (not verified)

I'm so pleased that once and for all it knocks on the head the idea that Novell are anti-KDE. Hopefully it will end the Kremlinology of each new release of openSUSE (and antecedents) regarding the batting order of desktops for installation.

by binner (not verified)

> Hopefully it will end the Kremlinology of each new release of openSUSE (and antecedents) regarding the batting order of desktops for installation.

I'm not really sure what this sentence does want to say :-). Don't expect changes to the desktop selection dialog during installation of the "fat edition" (6 CDs/DVD/boxed version/FTP). But openSUSE 10.3 will introduce additional new one CD installation media which contain only one single desktop, making you choose your desktop before download, so it will be comparable to Kubuntu and Fedora's KDE spin.

by Debian User (not verified)

Does doing good compensate for the bad? No, I don't think so. Giving money to KDE is nothing when you stick with Microsoft to kill ODF.

Many thanks to the Suse founders, but what a pity you sold out. I guess those guys should get KDE awards one day, they did the most to push KDE back then.

Yours,
Kay

by Debian User (not verified)

Oh, and great that Intel joined. This is a pure Intel machine that I bought because of the great Intel support for everything from CPU, chipset to graphics to WLAN.

Yours, Kay

by Dolphin-fanatic :) (not verified)

yeak, promoting OOXML instead of ODF is

by apokryphos (not verified)

It's fortunate, then, that no-one in the OSS world has done such a thing.

by Maurizio Monge (not verified)

Great Intel support for WLAN...
Sure.

by MamiyaOtaru (not verified)

Find me another 802.11g product with wpa2 whose driver is in the kernel. I used to use prism54, but the last of those with hardmac was long ago and didn't do wpa2.

Sure, newer Intel wlan models had some issues with binary userspace programs but my 2200bg (with pci to mini pci adapter) works great in my desktop with nothing but the stock kernel. Besides, it looks like the binary userspace program thing will soon be cleared up ( http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/85146 ). I really don't see the problem here.

by Maurizio Monge (not verified)

Intel being the only one supporting wpa2 does not make their driver work.
That's simple.

When i use wireless (latest development driver, previous do not even work) i get disconnected after 15 minutes, after which i have to reboot (rmmod/modprobe is not enough).
That's simple.

by Sutoka (not verified)

Don't mistake Novell to be a singular entity. Like any company, they're made of many people, and many separate divisions. Becoming a patron of KDE doesn't 'compensate' for the Microsoft deal (it is entirely possibly they noticed a little loop-hole in the wording of the contract they plan to exploit eventually, like what a lot of people thought the GPLv3 may cause, or maybe the people responsible for the deal are just flat out insane, no way to really know at this point).

Becoming a Patron of KDE shows that at least powerful elements in Novell are still serious about supporting Free Software, as well as showing their continued support for the Desktop Environment that is clearly superior to all the others. ;)

I say Novell should be congratulated for making this excellent step. Everyone makes stupid mistakes (except KDE devs of course ;), lets hope thats all it was and just try to move on.

Intel is the one I'm still surprised about, it seems like just yesterday they were the evil closed off empire while their main competitor was the one friendly to the OSS community, though it seems in recent times that it has pretty much reveresed entirely. Intel has been doing quite a lot of great things for the community such as open sourcing their graphics drivers (don't forget hiring people to work on Xorg!) and contributing their powertop tool.

by Henry Miller (not verified)

I'm not surprised that Intel is on the list. I remember a time when everyone was cheering on Microsoft to topple the big evil IBM. Today IBM is the good guys. Even while most open source people can't stand Microsoft today, once in a while they do something good and important to open source (generally in the legal areas).

Companies change all the time.

by Francis Giannar... (not verified)

First take a look at some FAQs . Let's summarise:

* doing good -- yes, they persistently do good. They're one of the biggest contributors to OSS software ever.

* They're one of the biggest and most dedicated backers of ODF, and they're very commited to it. Apart from Sun, Novell have the most developers working on OOo, right?

* "Giving money to KDE"? Erm, SUSE employ more KDE developers than any other Linux distribution. Didn't you read the story?

Just because a deal involves money it's not to say that anyone "sold out". These are just again typical emotive statements that don't have any grounding. There might be bad things about the deal, but you certainly haven't even touched upon them.

by Debian User (not verified)

"One the biggest contributors", hardly. That would be GNU, Sun or Redhat by any form of counting. Do the math, then tell me about what Novell did.

There are 14 people from Novell working on OOo it seems (see http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/features/ooo.html for what they do, mostly integration work and eye candy is listed), that's right.

That figure has largely increased since the MS deal, and the OOXML translator will be done (I have yet to come across a single document in that format).

And giving money, yes, that what it means to be a sponsor. Employing developers is not needed and won't make you a platinium sponsor alone. But have you forgotten that Novell wanted to drop KDE developers entirely, but had to reverse the decision due to customer requests (customers Suse had earned, developers that Suse has won).

It's not that their MS deal involves money. It involves the statement that Linux is not Free anymore, but that you need to pay Microsoft for the "right" to use unspecified patents that Linux and KDE may violate or not. That attacks the very fundamental freedom aspect.

And it's probably an idea that Novell and MS really both like, that not everybody should be allowed to enter the market. But to us it should be unacceptable.

But that part is so obvious and well discussed, do I have to mention it?

My intention is to point out, that Novell may be out to limit damages on its reputation, but the Suse you are talking of, it is no more.

Yours, Kay

by apokryphos (not verified)

> "One the biggest contributors", hardly. That would be GNU, Sun or Redhat by any form of counting. Do the math, then tell me about what Novell did.

I have no idea why you exclude Novell of the group above considering what they've done. Where exactly shall I begin? They employ more developers to work on each respective desktop environment (KDE and GNOME) than anyone else (including the above). They employ developers to work directly on and improve the kernel, GCC, alsa, OOo (as you've mentioned as well) etc. And this is just talking about recent contributions, which says nothing of i.e. how they were by far the biggest contributors to porting linux to x86_64 etc etc. You get the idea.

> There are 14 people from Novell working on OOo it seems (see http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/features/ooo.html for what they do, mostly integration work and eye candy is listed), that's right.

Incredibly curious how quickly you dismiss all of that. There is SO much more than what you just degenerated your commentary to. You've got the page; take a read of it again. But what is this? You're insulting the OOo developers who contribute substantial amounts of code to it?

> And giving money, yes, that what it means to be a sponsor. Employing developers is not needed and won't make you a platinium sponsor alone.

Exactly; and Novell do _both_. I find it incredibly striking that you're not giving Novell credit for this.

> It's not that their MS deal involves money. It involves the statement that Linux is not Free anymore, but that you need to pay Microsoft for the "right" to use unspecified patents that Linux and KDE may violate or not.

No, that's merely what you have read into it (helped along very nicely, of course, by Ballmer's fud which i.e. Perens and other people who think they have an "official spokesperson role" have apparently bought into).

Novell/SUSE could barely have made it any clearer that at no point in any of the deal did they admit to any infringement of patents. Read the original contract that was signed; it says it very clearly. Read Novell's comments on the deal -- they've continuously stressed this point. Also read http://opensuse.org/FAQ:Novell-MS

> My intention is to point out, that Novell may be out to limit damages on its reputation, but the Suse you are talking of, it is no more.

You couldn't be more wrong. SUSE is thriving. It has _gained_ Linux engineers overall, and Novell/SUSE's contribution to KDE couldn't be stronger. I'm incredibly interested in hearing about the Linux distribution that you think does more for KDE than SUSE. I'm all ears.

The "limiting damages" point is baseless considering Novell's contribution to free software in the past.

by Me (not verified)

- Original Status
Microsoft supports openXML
Novell supports ODF

- Microsoft and Novell start to create a translator between the two formats
Novell is now supporting OpenXML? Well, so Microsoft now is supporting ODF, isn't?

by reihal (not verified)

Does this mean that it is politically correct to compile KDE with Intels C++ compiler?
Can it be done, have anyone tried?

http://www.intel.com/cd/software/products/asmo-na/eng/compilers/277618.htm

by Artem S. Tashkinov (not verified)

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.

by Henrik Pauli (not verified)

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).

by Leo S (not verified)

>> 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.

Interstingly enough, a lot of companies like to make a separate interface for each platform. Like Skype uses Qt on Linux, but the Windows interface is made in Delphi, and the Mac interface with Cocoa. Instead of saving a bunch of work by making one Qt interface, they reinvented the wheel 3 times.

Similarly with Opera, they only use Qt on Linux (although they have their own UI toolkit that does most of the drawing on the major platforms (what is it about Norwegians and making toolkits? :)).

by Kevin Krammer (not verified)

> Interstingly enough, a lot of companies like to make a separate interface for each platform

This is usually the result of considering too late to also support other platforms.

When a company wants to create a multiplatform product by design, they have a real incentive to share as much code as possible (or the other way around to have as few pieces of platform specific code as possible).

But often companies decide at a latter point to actually support other platforms, which mean they already have considerably large amounts of platform specific code.

In the long run the first model is obviously superior, since the company at most needs one or two experts per platform and can have the majority of development work spread across all their developers.

Companies which are aware of this sometimes choose multiplatform technology like Qt even if they are now just aiming at a single platform product, just in case there is enough demand on different platforms later on.

by Sebastian Kügler (not verified)

> 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.

by Artem S. Tashkinov (not verified)

OK, I have no choice then but to backpedal ;-)

I'm glad you proved me wrong.

by insulae (not verified)

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

by Foxy (not verified)

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.

by bert (not verified)

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.

by Foxy (not verified)

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.;)

by Leo S (not verified)

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

by Sutoka (not verified)

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!

by James Richard Tyrer (not verified)

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.

by Ben (not verified)

>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

by scratching my head (not verified)

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

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....

by Artem S. Tashkinov (not verified)

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

by AC (not verified)

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".

by Kevin Krammer (not verified)

> 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

by Artem S. Tashkinov (not verified)

I'm so sorry for making such bold and lame statements.

I now clearly see that KDE is doing very well.

by Dan (not verified)

Thank you for acknowledging KDE's positive trajectory. I think it's great to see that rather than expressing negative opinions because you wanted to rile people up, you were expressing negative opinions because you yourself were honestly concerned, and that those concerns were themselves addressable.

by cm (not verified)

Actually, the thought that there were only ten people working on all of KDE made me chuckle.

They're good, but not _that_ good.

by cm (not verified)

And let's not forget the contributors without own svn account. For example, not all members of the translation teams use svn directly but send their work by email. Thus they won't show up among as committers.

by jospoortvliet (not verified)

And of course they haven't started translating yet, so it's only developers you see right now.

by Stu Warsnap (not verified)

> 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.

by Anon (not verified)

"With google's linux desktop supporting GTK"

What "linux desktop" is this?

"and now Openmoko also supporting GTK"

Openmoko is just one of a long line of niche Linux devices that have supported GTK. Why should this one suddenly topple KDE?

"its not hard to think otherwise"

When a project averages around 9000 commits *per month*[1], and has so for several years, and is *still* consistently voted the best desktop[2] (by a huge margin) years after the major distros have adopted it's competitor as default, *and* which is about to make the initial release of a series that is likely to step it up another notch and which is now natively cross-platform, it's pretty hard to be worried.

Stop spreading FUD, please.

[1] http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=514945
[2] http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-commits&r=1&w=2

by Anon (not verified)

The citations [1] and [2] are transposed, of course :)

Oh, and:

"GTK's LGPL license starts to show its advantages for companies."

The LGPL has been showing its "advantages" for years, and yet somehow, inexplicably!, companies are still buying Qt licenses. Probably because they consider a natively cross-platform, top-quality and incredibly well documented and easy-to-use toolkit to be worth the tiny fraction of a developer's salary that constitutes a Qt license.

And anyway, since when do we care about what companies that intend to keep their apps closed do? They don't affect KDE one way or another.

by LiquidFire (not verified)

"What "linux desktop" is this?"

I'm guessing it refers to the recently-released Google Desktop Search for Linux, which uses GTK libraries: http://desktop.google.com/linux/

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.

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.

stallman an egomaniac moron?
I thought he was a bona fide homosexual communist.
Peculiar that american business executives should want him as a bed partner.
But I guess the US is a peculiar place.