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List:       kde-promo
Subject:    Re: [kde-promo] Negative feedback about KDE non-openmindedness in  german Heise-Forum
From:       "Kristian A.Rink" <afterimage () gmx ! net>
Date:       2002-02-21 0:11:30
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On Wed, 20 Feb 2002 15:51:30 +0100
Daniel Naber <daniel.naber@t-online.de> wrote:

Hi all,...

even while being just a calm lurker on this list for quite some time, let
me take the chance to give my EUR0.02 on that discussion, right now:

> KDE is a community, so if you call that "unprofessional" you should
> maybe have a look at Mozilla: they seem to have more managers than
> coders, they seem to spend more time managing bugs than fixing them. Do
> you call that "professional"?

Well, well. IMHO mozilla indeed *is* not what I would call professional,
but I don't think it's a good thing looking at something way worse saying
"we're still better than them". Somehow I even can understand the things
this heise guy is writing, even if he probably didn't at all get the point
about open source / free software.

> tells others what to do. It's just some people developing software. And 
> there's no reason to change that so that it is easier for companies to 
> "work with" KDE.

I merely see the problem in here that most people still are looking for a
company name, for someone to 'be responsible' (for whatever that might
be), for a company and a brand name to stick with rather than for a good
product. Seeing the efforts here at work where we constantly are trying to
promote GNU/Linux and KDE as desktop system (which IMHO is the best
desktop system currently available), and I'm being asked very often about
"which company is this stuff from"? Perhaps, after all the years with
"Microsoft-wherever-you-are-looking", it takes just some time to make
people change this sort of attitude to some more realistic approach, to
make them see that, in this point, there is an operating system and a
desktop system on top of it, and that the desktop system probably will be
done by someone else than the operating system. I guess it will be a lot
easier for companies to work with open source software projects once they
discovered about how to get along with this sort of software philosophy...
> KDE is successfull *because* it's a real open source community. If 
> companies like the "it doesn't cost anything" aspect but dislike the
> "it's written by people who actually have their own opinion" aspect that
> their problem.

Perhaps things might change one day, perhaps things are possible to be
changed to a coexistence of companies and communities and users using
products made by both of those groups. To come up with this topic, I
always disliked the idea of a GNOME foundation, since IMHO it really
endangers the whole of the project to some day be controlled by those
being part of this foundation. I think, anyhow, that a project as huge as
KDE, even while being a community of developers, should have sort of a
'well-defined interface' to the rest of the world, to give people on the
outside the chance to, in any way, get in touch with the community as a
whole and not just with a few persons expressing their personal opinions
on very special topics (this would in worst case be bad for the community
itself). Perhaps there should be someone elected / chosen by the community
to do public relations, to make the project known and to help people
outside getting in touch with KDE, bringing their ideas and questions and
whatever inside the community to make people discuss them and decide about
them. 

Cheers,
Kris

-- 
Kristian Rink
paper: +49 180 5052 5560 8162 -- phone: +49 174 5360871
icq  : 107186898 (Kawazu) -- irc  : #metal on IRCNet (Kawazu)
web : http://www.secondnature.de

...gross ist nur, was man nicht erkennen kann,
...und groesser noch, was man nicht begreift.
(element of crime)
 
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