
Earlier this year, the KDE team
released the highly-anticipated 4th major revision of the KDE desktop. Instead of bringing evolutionary changes, KDE 4.0 effectively delivered a complete rewrite of KDE, and as a consequence the first release of the KDE 4 branch lacked a lot of features of KDE 3.x, while also being quite unstable and rough. Many even complained the KDE team shouldn't have released KDE 4.0 as 4.0, but rather as a developer preview release or something similar. During this storm of criticism, the KDE team calmly pointed out that KDE 4.1 would fix many, many of the issues people had with KDE 4.0. Starting today, there's no more pointing towards KDE 4.1: KDE 4.1
has been released today.
Member since:
2007-02-17
If indeed you did understand very, very well how open source code releases works, and you were being fair, then you would not have opined the following:
...
The only reason they made it a release is because they were already late, and didn't want to look bad by waiting another 7 months to do it right.
Rather, if you understood how it works, you would have understood that KDE 4.0 was ready for a .0 release ...
KDE 4.0 was indeed missing a great deal of functionality, no doubt. It was not ready if it were a commercial program, but it was ready for release in the sense it was an open source project following a "release early, release often" cycle of development.
For open source development programs, .0 releases do indeed lack significant slices of the eventual functionality. That is the way they are done.
Edited 2008-07-31 06:53 UTC