Slashdot Mirror
Bero Quits Red Hat Over Treatment of KDE
Vicegrip writes "In an article on leaked release notes on Redhat 8.0 CNet also revealed that Bernhard Rosenkraenzer, known here on Slashdot as berorh, has quit over objections he has on what Redhat is doing to KDE in the new release. Bero says that the new version of KDE in Redhat 8.0 is going to be crippleware.
I know I always found Bero's comments here on Slashdot helpful and insightful. His worries about what Redhat is doing to KDE for 8.0 have me rather concerned and thinking of switching distributions."
Mandrake 9.0 seems to respect KDE & GNOME, and Bero has been part of MandrakeSoft in 1999!
I wish I was stupid^H^H^H^H^H^Hwealthy enough that I could quit my job just on principle.
Let me be the first of 100's to point out that when you write free software, people are free to do what they like with it. No one seems to get up in arms when Redhat enhances "ls" to make it more friendly for their users...what's got everybody up in arms is that Redhat is trying to enhance its *brand* by hacking KDE.
Real free software people would be against (or at least oblivious) to the branding in the first place.
Slashdot 's editors are dickheads
Can someone who's actually USED a beta of RH8 talk about whether the KDE implementation is in fact crippleware? I was under the impression that it was just subjected to some Red Hat skinning and rejiggered so that some of the "scares the newbies" features were off by default. That doesn't sound like crippleware, but someone out there must know more.
I fail to see what Redhat is doing that could so offend Bero that he would quit his job with them. Redhat has already acknowledged that they have more Gnome experience on their staff, and Bero quitting will only exacerbate that problem. It seems to me that he is only creating a larger problem for KDE by leaving a position of influence at Redhat over something that appears to be rather benign, and actually insightful on Redhat's part. Looks like big egos will always get in the way of better software.
My sig hates me. That's ok, I never cared for it much anyway.
to Zero, to reflect his new income level.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Linux has started to become the platform of choice for extremely complex and involved multimedia production, powering enormous render farms and video storage RAID arrays, yet still, Linux falls on its face for mundane day-to-day productivity work. Linux can render the incredibly lifelike texturing and animation exhibited in "Monsters Inc." and "Titanic", yet it can't even open a simple Word document without formatting errors. While delivering superior performance rendering these intensely detailed and hard-wrought movie scenes, Linux stills falls short of Windows when playing Quake. How did we get into this perplexing state of affairs?
I'll tell you why -- good old fashioned ego. Whereas the low end (kernel developers, compiler writers, etc.) and high end (clustering software, 3D modelling and rendering, etc.) of development is led by strong, well-organised teams of well-trained developers with vision and understanding, the middle ground of the Linux world is polluted with warring egos and silly spats like this. There are myriad competing, mutually incompatible yet separately inadequate office suites (Star Office, KOffice, Applix,...), desktop environments (KDE, Gnome, XFCE, CDE, UDE, ROX,...), and X servers (XFree86, MetroX, XiG). We can't even decide on a printing system! If all the man-hours poured into fighting over KDE and GNOME were combined into a common vision, we would have one perfect end-user desktop, instead of two poor imitations of Windows.
Don't give me the old "competition" argument either. There is only one Linux kernel, which seems to progress just fine without another competing project nipping at its feet and instigating flamewars. The endless KDE vs. GNOME, Applix vs. StarOffice, and other feuds have wasted more productivity than would be gained by and competitive drive.
I, for one, am somewhat miffed that while my operating system powers Hollywood blockbusters and NASA supercomputers, it still can't fully replace Windows on my office desktop. Linux is growing up; its users need to grow up with it, shed their egos and work towards the common goal of creating an excellent working environment.
Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
Its not about whether RH or KDE is right.
An employee of RH was being asked to work on something he disagreed with. So he left.
KDE is free to moan, RH is free to mod KDE, and this guy is free to get employment elsewhere.
Personally, it restores some of my confidence in humans. At least we're not all wage slaves who couldn't give a rats ass what they were working for and who they were serving.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I'd really like for him to explain "crippleware". How are they crippling it? While he has seen it and I have to wait for another week, so far everything points to Red Hat simply changing the default themes and icons. I connot see how this is crippling KDE.
Furthermore, it is my understanding that the default KDE themes are in there and simply need to be selected from the configurator. How is this crippling it.
To go one step further, I see a fair bit of ranting, especially on Slashdot(go figure), about how bad this new Red Hat theme is. The thing is, if you don't like it change it. How many people actually continue to use KDEs default themes? Few if any, I'll bet. Pretty much everybody changes the desktop to their own preferrences. So, what's the big deal about selecting your own preferrences over the Red Hat theme versus selecting your own preferrences over the KDE themes?
Much ado about nothing....
AFAIK, it is the case. RedHat's trying to do something for people who aren't emotionally involved with either KDE or Gnome -- make a consistent, usable desktop. I think this is a good thing to do. KDE and Gnome are working together these days (see freedesktop.org). This is encouragement from RedHat to make KDE and Gnome more interoperable. If they don't interoperate, then there make as well be two entirely separate types of desktop linux -- KDE linux and Gnome Linux. Vendors would need to pick one (or both) to support.
Macs have a default interface. Windows has a default interface. Linux systems should as well. Note that you can run QT programs on Windows and MacOS -- similarly, you can use the toolkit of your own choice on a Linux system. But having a default desktop system would be a good thing for Linux in the desktop arena.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I win! I win!
Developers developers developers developers developers!
Red Hat used to be pushing GNOME, and pretty much ignoring KDE. The KDE guys didn't like this.
Now Red Hat is trying to integrate KDE into their distro seamlessly. The KDE guys don't like this at all.
What should Red Hat do to make these guys happy? I think the only way the KDE guys would be happy is if Red Hat puts in KDE without changing anything. Great, now Red Hat has two different install options that look and work very differently. What a support nightmare. So, Red Hat would have to budget more money for support of KDE, or else just say it isn't supported... in other words, push GNOME and ignore KDE.
So it looks like the only way the KDE guys will be happy is if Red Hat goes out of their way to increase their support costs. Let's face it, if it is going to cost money to keep the KDE guys happy, Red Hat isn't going to do it!
P.S. Calling the Red Hat version of KDE "crippleware" isn't helpful. Red Hat isn't trying to hurt KDE; they are a business, and how does hurting KDE make money for them?
Any bugs Red Hat introduces to KDE will increase their support costs. People who buy Red Hat call Red Hat when they have trouble.
Red Hat is doing this so that a user can run KDE apps or GNOME apps without really caring which is which. Some of the KDE guys are complaining that Red Hat will make KDE look bad. The idea is that no one will even notice whether they are using KDE or not.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Holy crap, what does it say about the state of labour in the IT world when quitting a job because you're being asked to do something you don't want to do is grounds for others suggesting you're trying to be a martyr??
.. thats cause for applause, even if I have no personal opinion on the nature of the disagreement between him and his former employer.
He's not trying to be a martyr. He's trying to have a job in which he agrees with the things he's asked to do. It's those who remain in the job at the expense of their happiness that are the dumb and childish ones. Whether or not KDE is "cripplewear" in RH is besides the point; he has set of values, he's actually going to do something about it
"Old man yells at systemd"
send my resume to for the newly open posistion? ;)
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Hello dolly!
... ripping shit down to rebuild, rejecting norms, rejecting opinions and denouncing things we percieve as misguided or wrong is a key part of the process required to arrive at newer and superior solutions.
.. and even quit your job if you like, although the way people go on here, you'd think they were envious or scared of the freedom to do just that.
It's like people have confused 'freedom' with 'freedom do you whatever the hell you want without actually being subjected to what other people _think_ of it'. Which is a shame, because peer discussion and judgement is about the most important check/balance in society. While we try and limit the actions that can result from peer judgement (to avoid mob justice, for instance), we should try and avoid attempting to squash criticism just because its not 'productive'
When people are free to do crap, don't forget others are well within their rights to freedom to voice dissatisfaction
"Old man yells at systemd"
Let me summarize what I have read:
From the article:
"Red Hat's new "Bluecurve" desktop interface, a customization of the traditional KDE or Gnome interfaces."
Translates too:
Red Hat decided - instead of using just KDE and Gnome to add Bluecurve which is a modified version of KDE that is "more user friendly"
Former RH employee
"I don't want to work on crippling KDE, and they (Red Hat) don't want an employee who admits (Red Hat) 8.0's KDE is crippleware,"
Translates too:
I think the majority of linux users will not want to use this "user-friendly" crap because linux users are all power users and red hat is dulling themselves down just to try and bring more noobs to linux and make some money and i'm too self-righteous to be involved in that hideous plot.
The words "Cripple KDE and former RH employee" appear on Slashdot and the masses go crazy....
Ave Molech Setting
Red Hat have:
is there a slashdot id berounemployed?
Actually, it's false, and I suspect you might not know it. GNOME was created by the GNU folks as an alternative to KDE at a time when KDE was dependent on a piece of non-free software, specifically the Qt libraries. Though it's now Free, Qt was at the time "shared source," more or less. Once Qt became Free, people kept developing and using GNOME because they were used to it and had come to prefer it.
They did it for the same reason RMS started GNU in the first place: to give people who insist on Free Software a good system to use. RMS didn't start GNU to "kill" SunOS or HP/UX or BSD, but to have the kind of system that his ethics and aesthetics preferred. Yes, BSD was non-free when GNU was started: BSD depended on AT&T proprietary Unix code. That quit being the case in 1994 or so -- but you wouldn't expect all the GNU and Linux developers to suddenly jump ship for BSD, would you? Of course not; as with GNOME and KDE, they had come to prefer their own system and kept developing it because they wished to.
That's called freedom. Not "killing" -- freedom. Learn to recognize it.
Very true. Red Hat is doing something that consumers have wanted (and Linux tweakers have been doing for some time with themes) -- making their KDE and GNOME apps look similar.
KDE people whining about this are going to be ignored. The GNOME people have accepted the loss of their icons without throwing fits, though it certainly changes RH GNOME's "look and feel". I can't figure out why the KDE people can't do the same for the changes that affected their "look and feel."
May we never see th
The underlying phenomenon here was illuminated many moons ago by ESR in his 'noosphere' essay, and is broadly obvious to anyone with a background in marketing.
Windows has a distinctive look-and-feel. The macintosh has a distinctive l&f. Why? Branding, branding branding! The same organisation that is responsible for the overall package -- the OS in Microsoft's case; computer in Apple's --- is responsible for the interface. The visual differences between KDE and Gnome exist for similar reasons. By replacing their respective brand-imagery with its own, RedHat now gets to gobble up the mindshare of both teams -- the only form of 'payment' that these projects really ask for --- without any sort of renumeration. Need I remind the reader how important mindshare is to the financing and ultimate success of any open source project? Would KDE have received funding from the German government if it had just been some grey nnonymous widget-maker for a couple of American software firms?
Sure, you could characterise this as a case of warring egos; but egos are essential to survival: The perfectly altruisitic quickly become fodder for the pragmatically selfish. KDE and Gnome are well within their rights to protest; their identities are their equity. That's how this market works --- regardless of the apparent legality or probity of such maneuvers under license.
- undoware.ca
It is a common misconception in these discussions that people are mad about the unified look and integration between KDE and GNOME that Red Hat is promoting. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I hope I can speak for all KDE fans when I say the unified look is a step forward, and integration is good. After all, people have been crying out for both for years. But what Red Hat is including is not KDE, it is simply KDE's panel used to launch other applications. The panel is not what makes KDE compelling, it's the app integration. If Red Hat wants to use GNOME app defaults, then what are they doing including KDE at all? It is a joke, simply so they can put "KDE desktop" on their boxes.
I am also not trying to say that Red Hat should drop all KDE support. No matter what, Red Hat should include libraries to run KDE apps, and I don't think anyone would argue otherwise. If they aren't going to use KDE app defaults, though, they might as well not include KDE as a choice on the login screen. There is no reason to.
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The only way a lot of the KDE guys would be happy is if RH excised GNOME, ditched every gtk+ app, fired everyone who worked on GNOME, and ran a Stalinesque show trial where everyone publicly humiliated themselves for having ever dared to do anything other than pour money into KDE.