OSNews

Nonsense argument. Open source is supposedly the superior development model that produces the best software - except when it doesn't, and then it's suddenly all puppy-eyes and 'we're so poor'.

This is no excuse, and it never has been. A very clear case of the attribution theory - attributing successes to oneself, but failures to others. Be a man, and take responsibility for the mistakes made during the 4.0 process. You'll learn from it. "

This is utter nonsense Thom. There is a world of difference in offering a supposedly "finished" commercial product for sale to consumers and an open source project (not even a distribution, but a project mind you) offering a .0 version for soliciting user feedback.

There were some distributions who made a mistake in releasing KDE 4.0 when they should have stuck with KDE 3.x (like MEPIS. PCLinxOS and Slackware did). That is NOT a mistake by the KDE developers or the development process. If anyone, distributions should learn from it.

BTW, why are you scathing about KDE 4.0 but totally ignoring your own site's review of GNOME 2.0, which was essentially the same situation?

Once again, I would ask for at least the tiniest bit of objectivity from you Thom. Oh, and a little less rudeness wouldn't go astray, either.

Edited 2010-08-11 13:48 UTC

.0 is a finished product. That's what it denotes. The fact that GNOME made the same mistake with 2.0 is none of my concern, nor is it any of KDE's. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I'm from before version numbers became a sleazy marketing tool to trick users into trying out and/or buying unstable, untested, and broken software.

Open source is no development model. It's a licensing scheme.
A development model is successful if it attracts more developers. That's what a development model is for.

If you're accusing others to have nonsense arguments, you should get the facts straight yourself or else you look rather clueless.

Edited 2010-08-11 17:44 UTC

I think he meant that Vista was still a Beta, development version produt, and Microsoft still released it to the public.

Meanwhile, KDE 4.0 was a development version, only intended for DEVELOPERS and people who wanted to test it, hence what a beta product should be.

Now you're talking bullshit. As member from the marketing team at that time, and as writer of a large proportion of the release announcement, I have said sorry. I've admitted the promo team made a mistake there, and you can find that 'sorry' sprinkled all over the web.

The mistake we did was not mention in the actual release announcement that this was very much a real 'FOSS' release following the 'release early, release often' paradigm and thus wasn't stable or feature complete.

We did mention that in the beta's, RC's, blogs and everywhere else - just not in the final announcement.

Otherwise, the reasons why we released 4.0 when we did can be found in my blog, and I still have to find anyone who has a decent rebuttal to my arguments other than 'but but... it wasn't stable!'. If you have arguments I didn't rebut in my blog, say so.

Otherwise, stop the backward arguments.