KDEvelopers on KDE Users

An anonymous reader writes: "KDE developers spent some time this week on their mailing list discussing what motivates them and the extent to which user concerns figure in their decisions. Dennis E. Powell's column on Linux and Main draws excerpts from the exchange, in which he participated, and says that he believes a lot more of this kind of discussion is needed."

Comments

Excellent points brought up by the article

[Sheetrock]

KDE got a lot of excellent programmers because it hit that certain momentum open source needs to survive (the point where you know the project is going to go on with or without you). I think that a lot gave up over the problems of maintaining backward compatibility, however. It's an ugly task, and one of the ones that doesn't particularly encourage anybody to work on it for the fun of it.

Someone said that Open Source will never effectively work on the desktop, because it's far too unstable; you can't program anything really useful for it without spending a lot of time and money nursing it through the inevitable changes the platforms around it create. I respectfully disagree, because I think that whenever there is a will, there's a way, and that when people need something, they're going to create it or maintain it.

There is a great deal of burnout being created by users demanding features in software that the developer isn't being paid for, too. KDE has mostly escaped this thus far, however there is some speculation that GNOME has more momentum because it's the underdog. Let's hope these two projects can continue to bring great things to the Linux desktop.