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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: starting to write a KDE auto-installer
From:       Waldo Bastian <bastian () kde ! org>
Date:       2001-08-21 18:11:29
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On Tuesday 21 August 2001 04:01 am, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote:
> So the question remains - if the KDE team will adopt red-carpet as an
> offical X86 installers (I doubt other platforms needs it since they got an
> established packaging mechanism and the last thing they need is an
> installer - like Sun or SGI).

The KDE Project releases "source tarballs" and as a courtesy service binary 
packages are made available through ftp.kde.org and its mirrors. The combined 
binary packages of a full KDE release currently take about 2Gb. For the 
future we intent to down-scale the amount of packages offered through 
ftp.kde.org and off-load this to the vendor/distributor. Currently this is 
already the case for the Debian and IBM AIX packages.

The rationale behind this is that KDE focuses on its primary activity: 
producing Desktop software for Unix. FTP-servers, CVS-servers, mailservers 
etc. are there to support this primary activity. Distributing KDE software to 
end-users is not a primary activity of KDE, this is rooted in two facts:
1) Others do a better job in distributing software, including KDE software. 
All the major Linux distributions include KDE and have everything in place to 
deliver software to end-users. We also start to see traditional UNIX vendors 
offering KDE through their own channels.
2) Distributing software costs money and KDE does not have any reliable 
source of income. All the infrastructure used by the KDE project, including 
servers and bandwidth, is donated to it. We want to use this infrastructure 
to _support_ KDE, but not as _part of_ KDE.
Or to use a cheesy analogy: You're friend might not mind lending you his car 
so you can do some shopping, but he/she is unlikely to be happy if you start 
a taxi-service with his/her car.

If you take the above two points and apply them to Ximian/GNOME/Red-Carpet 
you will see that Ximian isn't terribly good at 1), they only manage to 
support a limited number of distributions. With respect to 2) you will notice 
that they are a commercial company and although I don't know what their 
source of revenue is or will be, I assume that they have a business plan that 
covers this. The non-commercial GNOME project itself doesn't take part in 
Red-Carpet to my knowledge.

Cheers,
Waldo
-- 
KDE 2.2: We deliver.
 
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