KDE Archive

Following the recent complaints regarding the lack of proper market research in the F/OSS world, KDE users suggested paying money through Bugzilla to see their features/bugfixes done, a proposal that was denied by the core KDE developers. The lengthy discussion comes down to SuSE's Waldo Bastian reply which illustrates once more the developer-centric nature of F/OSS (in contrast to the more user-centric nature of commercial products): "KDE will be able to sustain itself just fine without users, while it will not last a single day without developers. So when it comes to choosing between scaring away developers and scaring away users, the choice is rather easy actually." (2nd reply)

Special Note: My article the other day that seemed to have created a huge controversy, was not about implementing every damn thing people wanted, but only implement things that are really needed by the majority and only when these things are not coming in contrast with the general direction of the project. For example, if someone was asking Gnome to implement a "KDE-alike control panel", that should be rejected because that design is not Gnome's way. But when someone says "make Shift+Delete to delete a file on Nautilus automatically", that's a legitimate feature request to be taken under consideration, and many users would expect it to be there already (that's not my feature request btw).

It's about market research, it's about putting together things that really need to get done (that's feedback filtered by a special team, not by the developers who are already under a lot of pressure). That's what market research is about. It's not about listen to every single idiot out there and his little or big feature request. So, don't take my article out of context and don't make it about myself or specific feature requests, because it is not so. It is about evolving a project to become better by taking in some well-structured user feedback in it. That's all.

The KDE Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of KDE 3.4 Beta 2, dubbed "Keinstein". Also, here's an article on KDE's usability.

Kommander is a powerful but easy to learn development environment. "Graphical Scripting with Kommander" takes us through the creation of a graphical interface for Konstruct, a tool for downloading, configuring and installing KDE from source packages. The article also lists some of the exciting developments coming to Kommander in the near future.

"The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.3.2, a maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes." Read the full announcement here, or download it here."

Open for Business has an interesting and comprehensive interview with KDE core developer and multimedia guru Scott Wheeler of JuK and TagLib fame. He outlines the future of KDE's multimedia efforts. Looks like things move away from aRts as sound server and multimedia framework to a very open minded best-of-breed strategy for KDE 4.0, with GStreamer being preferred at the moment.

Not so long ago Richard Dale announced Korundum, a RAD environment for KDE. And we should not forgetting Kommander and the official Qt Designer. It seems that KDE/Qt have more than enough RAD tools around. Now another KDE developer has announced Rubydiam, his efforts to bring JIT optimization to Ruby. The results could well be a competing runtime for Free Software development.