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How GNOME and KDE Spend Their Money
bluescarni writes 'A side-by-side analysis of GNOME's and KDE's quarterly reports sheds some light (and dispels some myths) on the nature and the quantity of the funds of the two projects.'
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TFA has no charts or graphics. Is this why the summery has no real info beyond the link?
Shocking!!!
GNOME: beer & smokes
KDE: blackjack & hookers
How GNOME and KDE spend their money
Sep 16, 2009 10:20pm GMT
Bruce Byfield
Quarterly reports are the stuff of business. In most people's minds, they are as far from the spirit of free and open source software (FOSS) as anyone can imagine. All the same, as non-profit organizations, many FOSS projects issue them. And while your first reaction may be to avoid quarterly reports, they can give some insights into projects, especially if you read between the lines.
For instance, if you have been assuming, as I have, that GNOME has more corporate support than KDE, and a larger budget, a look at the latest report for GNOME and KDE may surprise you. Together, the two reports give an entirely different impression than you might assume.
Neither quarterly report has much in common with the glossy publications offered by multi-national publications. Both are PDF files with undistinguished layouts and a minimum of graphics. Even head shots of people mentioned or reporting are absent. Compared to corporate reports, those of both GNOME and KDE are practical, unadorned publications.
Of the two, GNOME's (its first, covering June, July, and August 2009) comes closest to the spirit of a corporate report. It includes not only the obligatory message from GNOME's executive directory, but also reports from the Release, Bugsquad, Marketing, Web, Usability, Accessibility, Documentation, Art and Localizations Teams. Although some of these reports were outdated by the time the report was released, their overall impression is of a multi-tiered multi-national's executives reporting in. In general, the report fits in well with GNOME's traditional tendency to favor the corporate side and with its recent interest in marketing. Like most quarterly reports, it is as much a public relations document as an effort to provide concrete information (although it does both). The one non-corporate note is at the beginning, when executive director Stormy Peters asks readers, "please let us know if you find it useful!"
In comparison, KDE's report for March through June 2009 is less than one quarter the size of GNOME's. Although it includes the usual redundant introduction -- this time by Aaron Seigo, it contains far fewer individual summaries from GNOME's report. These differences may reflect the greater experience that KDE e.V. -- the German non-profit that manages KDE -- has with the whole idea of reports, and has the advantage that it is more likely to be read completely. At the same time, because it is so short, the KDE report seems less corporate, an impression that is fitting for the project's more community-based orientation.
Beyond these general impressions, what is most interesting is the financial accounting in the reports. The two reports are not strictly comparable, given that many FOSS activities occur in the northern hemisphere's summer rather than spring. Nor is it always obvious in either report what falls under each line item. Still, some differences emerge.
For instance, GNOME lists an income of just over $102,000 for the quarter covered by its report. This income includes $65,000 from the Desktop Summit, $20,000 from "advisory board fees" (which I interpret mainly as donations from corporate sponsors), and $12,400 collected by the Friends of GNOME, a promotional and fund-raising project.
Omitting the Desktop Summit as a one-time source of income, these figures mean that GNOME has traditionally relied on corporate supporters. Corporate supporters continue to provide the bulk of GNOME's income, but the total from Friends of GNOME suggests that GNOME may be switching to a more community-based source of income. However, given that GNOME reported an approximate income of $54,000 per quarter in 2008 (ht
They spend it on usability studies and graphic design, isn't it obvious?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
A proof that we spend money on features and bug squashing, not on fancy web servers!
Ezekiel 23:20
It would be only logical to invest a significant portion of their liquid assets into services of adult entertainers and various recreational-drug paraphernalia.
Also, blackjack.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
KDE already spent donated money buying all buttons and check-boxes available on the market.
839*929
> When elephants fight it is the grass under their feet that suffers the most.
True. Also, when elephants make love it is also the grass under their feet that suffers the most.
Go somewhere random
This seems to be saying that the GNOME and KDE organizations' funding are not a significant factor in the development of their related software.
In other words, this comparison tells very little of the actual funding that supports the development of either system. Presumably, those efforts are primarily funded through other entities (such as Trolltech, Linux distros, embedded device makers, etc.)
How are we supposed to have a GNOME v. KDE flame war without any significant data? That's like trying to have a debate about whether EMACS or vi is a superior editor on a device that has no keyboard!
Crap, I need a car analogy; can someone help me out here?
Last time I looked RHEL shipped with GNOME as the default. A quick search through redhat.com did nothing to disabuse me of that notion.
Considering most large enterprise distros (RHEL, SUSE, etc) ship with KDE as the main DE
Both SUSE's Enterprise offering (SLED) and RHEL default to GNOME. I don't know about etc.
No "large enterprise distro" currently ships with KDE as the main DE. SUSE is the only one that has decided to ship KDE by default, and that too very recently. Also, Linus's infamous statements are not a factor for people when deciding which DE to use. Seriously, they're not.
The reason why KDE is growing so much is because their community is insanely motivated. The only other community I've seen more motivated is the Drupal community. KDE is able to project a halo of (mostly valid) hype around itself which attracts users and hence contributors, which results in more features and hype, and so on.
OTOH, a lot of GNOME development is done by RedHat/Fedora dudes, and I constantly get the feeling that they are a closed book and don't pay attention to engaging the community and gaining contributors. There are exceptions of course, such as Richard Hughes and Dan Williams.
"..."
"Neither quarterly report has much in common with the glossy publications offered by multi-national publications. Both are PDF files with undistinguished layouts and a minimum of graphics. Even head shots of people mentioned or reporting are absent. Compared to corporate reports, those of both GNOME and KDE are practical, unadorned publications."
What quarterly reports has this guy been reading? Playboy's? The reports I got from Berkshire Hathaway and GE are both pretty boring, unadorned, and filled with numbers and text. There is very little graphics. It just annoys me a bit that the author just wrote that, especially when it adds so little to the article itself. Stop writing for word count.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Sorry to say that the guy dribbles on for half the article about what the reports LOOK LIKE. Why? Dunno. I reached this paragraph about halfway through the document: "Beyond these general impressions, what is most interesting is the financial accounting in the reports..." and thought to myself "finally!" Honestly. I don't need someone to describe the appearance/layout/graphics of the report. I daresay most folks going to read the article don't either. Still, the finance info was interesting - as interesting as finance info ever is.
Those who have telepathy have no need to RTFA.
Condoms, hopefully...
If anyone is actually interested:
http://ev.kde.org/reports/ev-quarterly-2009Q1.pdf
http://foundation.gnome.org/reports/gnome-report-2009-Q2.pdf
What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?
I think it's the 'A', definitely. I mean, when someone says "A..." whatever, what exactly are you supposed to infer from that? It has always confused me.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
SuSE had KDE by default back in 2000 when I was using it.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
As GNOME foundation is running out of money, will this change the major distro's support, or will they stump up the shortfall when Gnome needs it?
Personally, I'd like to see Redhat, Debian or Ubuntu take KDE as the default. There's no reason not to now, and I'd like to see the competition between the desktop environments increase, that should drive more features and polish! If the KDE community have made such significant feature updates without being a major distro's default says a lot (of good) about it.
On the other hand, maybe the facty that linux runs Gnome is the reason it has never been popular on the desktop. A switch to KDE might be enough to make people try it, like it and stick with it! (yeah, sure, dream on :) )
No, it's the people who are riding the elephants at the time that suffer most.
"So, in other words, you're completely fucking wrong, you idiot retard. God bless." - ShakaUVM
Who is ShakaUVM, and why do they think everyone is fucking wrong and an idiot retard?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
To be fair, a lot of Ubuntu users haven't heard of Linux either.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
SuSE 5.1 had KDE as the default DE back in 1997.
Bring back Sirius Punk!
I've used both environments over a long period of time on dedicated linux desktops. Both are competent products. Gnome looks good under Ubuntu 9.04. KDE 4.3 looks awesome as well. Both are sufficiently feature rich. Both add features rapidly on an ongoing basis. Both are solid products. The money is being well spent no matter how you look at it. I like that KDE has about a quarter million dollars banked. It shows strength and greater longevity.
My personal favorite, after using gnome for years, is KDE (which I have used since KDE 4.2). On a regular basis I see fixes and upgrades, though there still are some annoying aspects to it. After 25 years in computing and having dealt with Windows for most of that, KDE is probably the best and most well rounded desktop manager, even well beyond windows Win7, and certainly Vista. I have 4 Vista boxes in shop and I have a Win7 RC box for testing. I also have 3 Apple OSX systems. Nothing generally impresses me about them. I've watched compiz, beryl, and kwin turn into super feature rich, well balanced, polished and tailored products that in many ways existed before Vista was released.
Let's just say that I'm very impressed that these two organizations are producing products comparable or better than the competition. It is good to see that they are doing so much with so little.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Eye Owl wise ewes a spill chucker - mcgrew
A bird, a sheep and an australian sex-toy?
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
No "large enterprise distro" currently ships with KDE as the main DE. SUSE is the only one that has decided to ship KDE by default, and that too very recently.
Mandriva has long shipped with KDE as the preferred desktop and offer a good implementation of it, but they also offer a choice of several desktops.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
I think you mean the 'KUI'
That's only OpenSuSE. SLES defaults to Gnome these days. And the original comment was about "large enterprise distros", so you're still correct.
That's kind of the impression I've always gotten from GNOME and KDE - all the way back to 1.x versions of GNOME and KDE.
GNOME has always had a very "business" feel to it, almost like it took a great number of its design decisions from CDE or UNIX heritage and tradition - not only in design decisions but also in philosophical, organizational ones. Unfortunately, it seems to me that a lot of those decisions result in a lack of usability on the desktop/GUI where they might work just fine with CLI. Organizationally, it stifles things.
KDE has always had more of an "open" approach; they've encouraged the fanaticism, as well as community involvement and decision making. It's also (arguably) a much better framework - as evidenced by the more complete ports to other OSes, QT cross development/kdevelop, and companies like Nokia picking QT for future development of mobile devices.
When it comes down to GUI development, an "amateur" or non-hardcore programmer is going to look at the two and say: I can either develop on GNOME/GTK and use crappy somewhat OO C or a 3rd party binding like Python (seemingly very popular) or I can write it in C++ with a Visual Studio-like interface (and I've also got some other options there). For many, it's a no-brainer, so QT gets a lot more developers.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I mean, when someone says "A..." whatever, what exactly are you supposed to infer from that?
That they are Canadian?
> If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
Good thing I have other plans!
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Of course, mouth breathers and trolls will claim that developers dont listen to users.
KDE developers don't listen to users. If they did, they would remove the $%*@%&#% cashew from the desktop.
Hah. It just so happens that the only package in Fedora's repos with "hate" in its name, does just that, so install it (and then add the applet) if you prefer an absolutely spotless desktop. Of course, it'd be nice to be able to more simply disable it without using a workaround package.
$ yum info \*hate\*
Loaded plugins: changelog, fastestmirror, presto, refresh-packagekit, security
Installed Packages
Name : kde-plasma-ihatethecashew
Arch : x86_64
Version : 0.3
Release : 2.fc11
Size : 55 k
Repo : installed
Summary : Removes the KDE Plasma Cashew From the Corner of the Display
URL : http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/I+HATE+the+Cashew?content=91009
License : GPLv2
Description: Removes the KDE Plasma Cashew From the Corner of the Display.
Power to the Peaceful
It's also (arguably) a much better framework
I have to admit, the KDE stack's design always bothered me, and I used GNOME (well, mostly I used Macs, but I did fire up a GUI on my servers now and then). But when GNOME started heading towards .NET, I looked again, and KDE had re-done their architecture into something very elegant (KDE4). Now, at that time, KDE 4.1 had just come out, and was a steaming pile of dung, but then 4.2 was much better, and 4.3 is really solid. Meanwhile, Nokia got on board, did the Free-er license, and the roadmap ahead looks really good.
4.3 is ready to try. It's still not as good as a Mac, but it works pretty well. I heard something recently that some of the best features won't make 4.5, but perhaps 4.6 will be ready to take on the competition.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Are you saying that this Ubuntu can run on a computer without Linux underneath it, at all ? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services ?
That sounds preposterous to me.
If it were true (and I doubt it), then companies would be selling computers with a Ubuntu. This clearly is not happening, so there must be some error in your calculations. I hope you realise that Linux is more than just the kernel ? Its a whole system that runs the computer from start to finish, and that is a very difficult thing to acheive. A lot of people dont realise this.
Linus just spent $9 billion and many years to create Linux, so it does not sound reasonable that some new alternative could just snap into existence overnight like that. It would take billions of dollars and a massive effort to achieve. IBM tried, and spent a huge amount of money developing OS/2 but could never keep up with Linux. Apple tried to create their own system for years, but finally gave up recently and moved to Intel and Linux.
Its just not possible that a freeware like the Ubuntu could be extended to the point where it runs the entire computer fron start to finish, without using some of the more critical parts of Linux. Not possible.
I think you need to re-examine your assumptions.
(This is an adaptation of an original work of art which can be located at http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-12355-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=31199&messageID=579806&start=43)