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 codeofjustice (not verified)

so your picking on GTK huh...maybe its cuz gtk is lgpl whereas qt which kde uses isn't ?

One is MORE FREE than the other so lets not obfuscate the issue shall we , and while your at it keep up the good kde work by showing what utter homophobe's and illiterates you are :)

I bet you dont eat shell fish either ;)

> FSF pretty much dictates RH and novell's agenda.

Ah, so it was the FSF initiating the deal with Microsoft? ;-)

> Novell has retained some of the KDE developers it inherited from SUSE

Actually SUSE employs the same amount of developers to work on KDE than before the acquisition by Novell, and three of five current developers were hired after.

> it tries to be just like RH ( supporting only ext2/3 and gnome )

You're mistaken, SUSE does support KDE and ReiserFS 3.

> The 'kernel developers' hired by novell and RH are in MA

Massachusetts?

> Interesting how novell moved its systems development operations to MA after acquiring SUSE.

Strange that Novell just sent out a press release last week about expanding the Nuremberg location.

> All these facts can be verified.

Verified and found to be false.

> Strange that Novell just sent out a press release last week about expanding the Nuremberg location.

Please give a link. Their job search at http://www.novell.com/job_search/servlet/eJobSearch doesn't even list Nuremberg as one of their locations.

Maybe it was a Germany only press release: http://www.verivox.de/News/ArticleDetails.asp?aid=55749&pm=1

> Their job search [..] doesn't even list Nuremberg as one of their locations.

You have to look at the EMEA page: http://www.novell.com/offices/emea/jobs/

Get over novell and m$. ALL commercial companies have business agreements. IBM has been a m$ pimp for decades ( and still are) and so is dell. And both these cos are current favourites among (clueless) linux geeks today.

Do not confuse opensuse with novell/SLED. In SLED, they carefully removed kmail, konqueror and other key KDE apps from the KDE distro. In fact it is RH that offers ( a largely labotimized and buggy version of) KDE; novell has made press releases quite some time ago that they will officially support only gnome. So, even though you can hunt for KDE and install it on their "enterprise" desktop/server, guess what businesses do when they see the word "support"? Not to mention, novell is trying to integrate all the s/w that is important to businesses with gnome.

Show me proof that they recently hired (or trying) KDE developers.It should be easy - just post links to jobs at novell that are pertinent. The same goes for their German location. Most of the (important)jobs when I looked, listed MA . Not even Utah, much less Germany.

Ximian plays a big role in Novell's overall strategy. And they are the originators of gnome. de icaza hates KDE with a passion. Sure, novell cannot touch opensuse because it is a community effort but how long do you think they will keep employing people who are not important for their corporate strategy ?

And BTW, FUD works. People in my org have almost no experience with linux. Even these people have swallowed the RH agenda somehow. They frown on me when I install KDE instead of gnome. I didn't realize they were even aware of KDE or gnome ( because they don't use linux) ! The only reason they don't like KDE is because of FUD.

People in the KDE community may have become complacent about gnome ( because there is less animosity on mailing lists) and gnome people believe that they already won the desktop 'battle' ( hence less animosity). Truth of the matter is that linux is still rarely used on the desktop in businesses (at least in the US) and so it doesn't matter yet. As for 3rd world countries, they just replace linux with pirated windows versions. I wouldn't be surprised if OLPC laptop gets hacked to run windows.

> And BTW, FUD works.

That means you will continue to FUD here? ;-(

by Mauricio Piacentini (not verified)

>Truth of the matter is that linux is still rarely used on the desktop in >businesses (at least in the US)

Worldwide I do not think the above is true. In Brazil for example the absolute majority of Linux desktops (government, companies or individuals) is KDE-based.

> In SLED, they carefully removed kmail, konqueror and other key KDE apps

You're wrong again: SLED does contain KMail, Konqueror and other key KDE apps.

> they will officially support only gnome.

That's wrong or obsolete: KDE is supported, on all products including SLED.

> Show me proof that they recently hired (or trying) KDE developers.

What's the point showing that at the moment no new developers are hired?

by Artem S. Tashkinov (not verified)

> You're mistaken, SUSE does support KDE and ReiserFS 3.

Fact N1: Novell has officially abandoned ReiserFS support after Hans Reiser was detained after being accused of killing his spouse.

Fact N2: Only recently Novell confessed they would continue KDE support. The truth is that Novell gave up on KDE after acquiring Suse.

Fact N3: Novell decided to continue supporting KDE after being pressed by their _corporate_ users.

Your "facts" are wrong: Novell supports ReiserFS 3 as said, the "announcement" to not include ReiserFS 4 as long it's not in the upstream Linux kernel was done IIRC one week before Hans Reiser being accused.

About KDE, Novell "confessed" its support for KDE in 2005 (nothing I would call "recently") only days after some rumor article saying that it would be chopped. And that article was posted two years after Novell acquired SuSE so your association with "after acquiring" is far-fetched.

It's always funny when some outsider thinks that he knows more than some company insider ;-)...

by Troy Unrau (not verified)

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.

by Anon (not verified)

"Dude, we had 250 developers at Akademy, and are averaging somewhere on the order of 350 commits per day."

At the risk of causing an unpleasant flamewar, this statistic should be contrasted with GNOME+Gtk, which combined averages around 4500 or so commits a month, compared to KDE's 9000+ - i.e. if we count raw commits, GNOME+Gtk is *half as active* as KDE, and due to GNOME's policy of having many mini-releases in between its major releases, hundreds of these are merely updated translations for apps, or tagging releases, updating changelogs etc - i.e. commits where not a single line of code is changed.

KDE's 9k+ commits a month, of course, does not count improvements to Qt, which also seems to be very actively developed. Does anyone know if Trolltech release stats such as the number of commits per month ... ?

If I was going to be worried about the state of one of the desktops, it wouldn't be KDE :)

by vm (not verified)

>> If I was going to be worried about the state of one of the desktops, it wouldn't be KDE

Well, we all know how prevalent windows is on the desktop compared to linux and it has nothing to do with technical superiority, stability, number of devs etc. Gnome is in a similar situation w.r.t. KDE as 'doze has w.r.t. linux. All the 'major' companies such as RH, novell and Sun are backing gnome. Of course, since that hasn't led to any real adoption, it doesn't seem to matter. Besides, none of these cos really make any great desktop s/w sales to corporations that we know of.

This should not be misinterpreted as all software cos backing gnome - in fact most of them only back windows. It is more of a political thing; how much it will matter in the future remains to be seen.

by Thiago Macieira (not verified)

No, Trolltech doesn't release such stats. But if you look at Lars Knoll's presentation at aKademy, you'll see that they have a team of 40+ people working on Qt fulltime.

Also note that Qt developers work in a rather flexible environment and may be working on "research" projects. Those commits may not count towards the Qt development, but they mean work is being done.

by Anon (not verified)

I see - thank you, Thiago :)

by Artem S. Tashkinov (not verified)

> compared to KDE's 9000+ - i.e. if we count raw commits, GNOME+Gtk is *half as active* as KDE

Where can I find such statistics?

by Anon (not verified)

Oops, sorry:

http://cia.vc/

keeps the tally for the last month. KDE's full history of commits can be found at

http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-commits&r=1&w=2

I don't know where GNOME keeps theirs, but I do know that (according to cia.vc), they've had < 5000 commits for at least two months running (when I started checking these things).

by Anon (not verified)

"I don't know where GNOME keeps theirs"

Aha - http://mail.gnome.org/archives/svn-commits-list/.

It doesn't seem to contain valid data before Jan '07.

It looks like cia.vc undercounts both KDE and GNOME, as GNOME made 5283 commits according to this list (but 4838 according to cia.vc; a shortfall of 445) and KDE made 10867 according to the kde-commits mailing list, whereas cia.vc reported just 9864 (a shortfall of 1003).

by Henrik Pauli (not verified)

Interesting to see Novell there. I hope they'll behave :)

by fear (not verified)

Sorry for my limited english.

It is an excellent idea to get KDE running on Windows (my significant other, a Windows user, *adores* the Konqueror) and Novell will support you to get things done, but I am paranoid because of the Novell-Microsoft-Deal.

Will the Novell-Microsoft-Deal affect the developement of KDE?

How will Microsofts refusal, to acknowledge the GPLv3, affect KDE?

by apokryphos (not verified)

> and Novell will support you to get things done

Why do you say that?

> I am paranoid because of the Novell-Microsoft-Deal.

Which part are you paranoid about? Take a look at http://opensuse.org/FAQ:Novell-MS

> Will the Novell-Microsoft-Deal affect the developement of KDE?

The deal was made quite some time ago. Even with the GPLv3 Novell is not prohibited of any of its Linux offerings. It probably only had a positive effect on KDE, as Novell is doing even better because of the deal (more linux engineers, more cash, more sled coupons sold), which in turn is also good for KDE as Novell is a big contributor to kde.

by fear (not verified)

>Why do you say that?
Because I think that the patronat is good for both, Novell as well KDE.

>Which part are you paranoid about?
I just thought that Microsoft tries to "eat" its "Partners". But I might be wrong and Microsoft is a friendly company.

Thank you for explaning the things und giving useful links.

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

> But I might be wrong and Microsoft is a friendly company.

LOOOOOOOOL! That's a good one.

by jospoortvliet (not verified)

It sure is ;-)

by apokryphos (not verified)

> I just thought that Microsoft tries to "eat" its "Partners". But I might be wrong and Microsoft is a friendly company.

Even so, the position that "Microsoft are pure evil and are patent geniuses" is misguided. Their history also implies the contrary. Take a look at http://en.opensuse.org/FAQ:Novell-MS#Microsoft_are_Patent_geniuses_and_c...

For Novell specifically so far the deal has been incredibly good: more money to invest, more SLE coupons sold, more Linux engineers employed.

by fear (not verified)

In my eyes the one and only goal of Microsoft is to make more money. And yes, I think that they are patent geniuses. In Novell I see some kind of idealism. I do not trust Microsoft, but I am willing to learn because things can change.

by jeagle1255 (not verified)

i do love this pclinu to the ones that worked on this good job to all worked on it and thanks