KDE wants to have his cake and eat it?

[Ryan]

[edit] This is not against aaron seigo and in retrospect it should be called KDE wants to eat cake.... etc rather than Aaron.

After listening to a few different podcasts with him on the show (LAS and TLLTS) and reading his blogs, it seems he wants as the saying goes to have his cake and eat it.

He is going on "it's a developer version! please don't give us flack!!! it's a developer version", then he's also complaining that KDE 4 for kubuntu 8.04 won't be long term support, which if you have been listening to him makes sense as he says 4.0 isn't for the mass public, 4.1 will be, but if they had released KDE 4 a few months back then 4.1 may have been ready for 8.04.

They also threw a big launch party for 4.0 when they have said it's a developer version, why not just call it 3.99, and then when it would of been .1 release then call that 4.0, because for the mass populus 4.1 release isn't quite as good as a nice round, solid 4.

It seems that alot of the big developers have been hiding behind the excuse that they aren't like propietary vendors and therefore we shouldn't apply the same the same rules to them, but imo for example when ubuntu release 8.04 they want to compete directly with XP for market share, if people complained about the theme if they were to go "well if you don't like the theme: make one yourself!" then who would take them seriously? No-one but Aaron seems to be playing the card of "well it's open source, I mean we want to compete with the proprietary world but then if we don't do well we'll just say 'we are open source, we haven't much money' " and frankly it's starting to grate.

If KDE want's to play with the big boys they need to learn to take reviews etc on the chin.

[tommy]

actually, I recall him agreeing that kde 4.0 shouldn't be in a long term release. However he seemed to be disappointed that the current kde 3.5.x (which is still being maintained) wasn't going to be LTS either.
If you keep that in mind, you might be able to see his point.
Also, in one of those interviews, he explained that the developer releases simply didn't get the attention they wanted or needed, and putting out an early .0 release was their way around that. In order not to disappoint Joe Public, they obviously had to try to manage people's expectations and they seemed to put tremendous effort into that in the last few weeks. Maybe they overdid that a bit, and I can see why you're starting to get annoyed by that, but I think you and me are in a small minority of people who have been overexposed to the KDE news channels.
Finally, nobody is happy about bugs in software releases, be it free software, or not. I think its pretty safe to assume that the developers are at least as annoyed about bugs as users are, so imagine hearing the same criticisms (some of which probably no longer apply to the current version), and try to picture how grating that must be. No wonder developers feel the need to blow off some steam every once in a while. Usually, its just cursing at the monitor, but on rare occasions, it spills out into some public forum.

[garwaymatt]

ubuntu release 8.04 they want to compete directly with XP for market share,

One small thing, that would be Vista

1. What is the point of trying to be better than a seven year old operating system?

2. Not many people are using vista at the moment so it might be a bit easier

[Ryan]

Heh, I wrote XP and thought I should change that to Vista, but why waste more time talking about windows heh.

Ah I couldn't find the exact interview about the LTS, I was listening to tllts I believe and I heard him complaining about it not being lts and I assumed he was meaning 4.0

Thanks for the decent reply, I posted this into another forum for more peoples thoughts on it and they assumed I was a windows guy trying to flame bait linux users =/

[Allix]

The TLLTS Episode 226 is where aaron seigo spoke about kde 4.0.

I do sympathise with him, free software is as much in competition with proprietary as its not.
Free software largely is about the fun of making a project, not so much about getting £££££.

Release now , release early is the motto of free software and kde 4.0 release is no different.
Without repeating what aaron said, if they kept on working on the code and kept delaying in, it simply would not be free software.

I played around with the suse livecd with kde 4.0 and to be honest its actually very usable, its really slick, the new widgets are very nice a huge improvement on karamba crap which they have taken out completely. The new file manager Dolphin is clean and no frills like konqueror. The system configuration menues have changed to my eyes for the better.
Overall it looks like a promising future for kde 4.x .

What kubuntu do is there choice, the fact that there are many other distros that will offer kde 4.0 soon. Fedora 9 , suse ... and RHEL will most likely be based on Fedora 9 will include it . So if your looking for long term support for kde 4 relatively soon either RHEL or Centos is there.

[mrsomethingorother]

The TLLTS Episode 226 is where aaron seigo spoke about kde 4.0.
What kubuntu do is there choice, the fact that there are many other distros that will offer kde 4.0 soon. Fedora 9 , suse ... and RHEL will most likely be based on Fedora 9 will include it . So if your looking for long term support for kde 4 relatively soon either RHEL or Centos is there.

offtopic:
As I see it the LTS furor was never really about LTS. As a business decision not going LTS is probably not a huge issue for any of Canonical's customers who I'm sure will get continued support on Dapper or extra assistance moving to Hardy+1/+2 and I doubt very much . I think it was more about Kubuntu's place in the Ubuntu family. After Kubuntu was announced and Mark did his little speech about KDE being an important project and getting in KDE developers, a lot of KDE users felt like they might have found an alternative they could trust since the other big distros had effectively dumped KDE for Gnome. It seemed to the community that nothing was ever really done (paid devs?, promotion?, etc) to make Kubuntu an equal partner let alone a competitive one to Ubuntu. Take a look at Kubuntu's goals for Hardy to get an idea of what I mean. Anyways I think this whole saga tainted the debate about LTS vs not LTS and made it less of a technical one and more emotional than it should have been. Or maybe I'm just crazy...

[msemtd]

Hmmm, I don't see any problem with having cake and then being able to eat it: this morning I brought some cake with me to the office and if some bastard had tried to stop me eating it I would have been obliged to give them a good beating.

[Aq]

Hmmm, I don't see any problem with having cake and then being able to eat it: this morning I brought some cake with me to the office and if some bastard had tried to stop me eating it I would have been obliged to give them a good beating.

Indeed, as Jo Brand (I think) once asked, what's the point of having cake if you're not going to eat it? That's what cake is for.

[Ryan]

After a rather lengthy debate with some people about this issue it came to my attention the point I was trying to get accross was:

You can't change around what you think .0 and .1 means and work against how everything is usually released and then complain if that confuses people and they complain about it such as KDE have done in this case. As peopled were confused by the RC releases of KDE, which weren't RC releases. You can't simply just say "well you run linux - so you should know what we mean"

There is no where on the KDE website to inform users that the .0 is not totally complete (I use that in the sense of stable and not obviously meaning the perfect DE) and that if they want the more stable releease to wait for .1 or even a .0.x release, because the parties they had to celebrate the release (and they are entitled to do so as they worked very hard) will attract people such as digg/slashdot users and mainstream reviewers.

As I said if you want to roll with the big boys you have to stick the same terminology, otherwise it's not going to be received aswell as it could be, and then saying "well we are open source not proprietary so it doesn't affect us" just doesn't cut it for a desktop environment implemented in real companies and not just your geeky linux users.

[R.Smith]

As I said if you want to roll with the big boys you have to stick the same terminology, otherwise it's not going to be received aswell as it could be, and then saying "well we are open source not proprietary so it doesn't affect us" just doesn't cut it for a desktop environment implemented in real companies and not just your geeky linux users.

"Real companies" shouldn't be using the very latest D.E. release anyway, that's just asking for trouble. Also, since when has the FOSS community been obliged to release super stable software for companies? I'm inclined to agree with the KDE dev's P.O.V. here because there is absolutely no onus on them to be releasing rock-solid software at all, let alone for the first release of a major re-write; companies be damned.

[Ryan]

I don't think you quite understand what I'm saying though, I didn't say KDE had to release perfectly stable software for the first release - however if that's what they are doing then calling it a .0 release and not mentioning on the website that it's not a 'proper' release then they have problems.

Also, the FOSS community has never been obliged to release stable software to the big companies - I never said they did. However alot of distros pimp themselves as OS's available for the business world and I would assume the KDE would like to be the DE for these releases, so they are not obliged but I assume that most big projects want to have businesses use there software.

[Allix]

Ryan, i am not sure if you have been following kde 4.0 development since is release, the amount of bug reports from users would not of happend if they said " KDE is proud to present KDE 4.0 ......... WARNING :: its not a release users should be using"

In order to get response you need to pretend its a good release.

BTW no business would be compiling kde 4.0, they use whatever the distro they use provides, its unlikely to be Gentoo,Kubuntu,Fedora or any distro that makes a release every 6 months or so. They might use sled, rhel that comes out every couple of years.

[R.Smith]

I don't think you quite understand what I'm saying though, I didn't say KDE had to release perfectly stable software for the first release - however if that's what they are doing then calling it a .0 release and not mentioning on the website that it's not a 'proper' release then they have problems.

Also, the FOSS community has never been obliged to release stable software to the big companies - I never said they did. However alot of distros pimp themselves as OS's available for the business world and I would assume the KDE would like to be the DE for these releases, so they are not obliged but I assume that most big projects want to have businesses use there software.

My apologies, Ryan. I've just re-read my post and I feel I came across as slightly abrasive. Allix seems to have posted something along the lines of what I had intended, but failed miserably, to say.

[Ryan]

Thats okay, my first post was rather harsh sounding aswell when I look back at it (of course I can't change it or people will be confused) and it took me a few days to put into words exactly what I meant.

[Ryan]

In order to get response you need to pretend its a good release.

BTW no business would be compiling kde 4.0, they use whatever the distro they use provides, its unlikely to be Gentoo,Kubuntu,Fedora or any distro that makes a release every 6 months or so. They might use sled, rhel that comes out every couple of years.

Heh, thats an intresting way of getting testers. You're right about the businesses compiling KDE, fair point.