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KDE Founder Receives Highest German Honor
Jiilik Oiolosse writes "KDE founder Matthias Ettrich was decorated today with the German Federal Cross of Merit for his contributions to Free Software. The Federal Cross of Merit is both the most prestigious as well as the only general decoration awarded by the Federal Republic of Germany. It is awarded by the Federal President for outstanding achievements in the political, economic, cultural, and other fields. Matthias was awarded the medal in recognition of his work spurring innovation and spreading knowledge for the common good."
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My kompliments...
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
This would never happen in the United States. They are too busy patting themselves on the back for outsourcing development to India and synergizing the next mission statement.
Shouldn't they have given him the German Federal Kross of Merit?
Posted from Konqueror.
Take THAT gnome!
Except if it wasn't for GNOME Qt would still be proprietary. It's easy to neglect the impacts OSS projects have on eachother, even if they don't share one single row of code.
I am the lawn!
Actually, Miguel de Icaza has already received one of the highest American honors: a corporate vice-presidency.
This is really just consolation for the Nobel Peace Prize he was supposed to win.
If this is the only general award given by the German government that it is also the least prestigious, too?
If only he were from a Commonwealth country, then he could be made a KBE.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
So you can argue it's not THE highest honor... He received the lowest class of the Federal Cross of Merit. But that still is some achievement!
The Federal Cross of Merit is both the most prestigious as well as the only general decoration awarded by the Federal Republic of Germany.
Wouldn't that also make it the least prestigious general decoration?
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Congrats Matthias.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Good - What a nice recognition for hard work in public service.
A jelly donut ?
ich ein berliner
He received it as a plasmoid and it crashed his desktop. But it looks nice.
just wondering
I bet you're fun at parties.
Actually, it is the "least prestigious" form of the "most prestigious" decoration.
There are several classes of the Cross of Merit and from the picture it looks like he was awarded the "Medal of Merit", i.e. the lowest one.
There was a real choice of FOSS toolkits back then?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
QPLists? Fuck me. Say what you want about the tenets of the GPL, but at least it's an ethos!
On other unrelated news, Miguel de Icaza was given the Golden Windows medal by Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, for his outstanding job at undermining Free Software principles, and destroying Linux from within.
1) I can hardly say c++ is a bad language, especially from the perspective of the time when kde was started at. 1996 (the start of kde) was the pentium 1 era where performance was more looked at and higher level language less mature then they are today.
2) Key word, *could* have but they managed this department pretty well i'd say with from written the guarantee to the eventual lgpl of QT (thus making it FOSS). So I fail to see the error in their choice as choosing QT did not affect them in any major way license wise. If kde died early on, it would have been no biggie as it would only take away the value kde initially added. But this issue was addressed pretty early and is a non-issue now.
If you mean, the development (creation of kde and gnome) is the issue. Well, they got popular for a reason. If somebody could write a *Better* windows enviroment using what you/they thought would be a "good" language and toolkit (I assume you mean toolkits when you say platforms instead of things like x86 and ppc), they could have and still can write it. The great thing about foss is that you CAN'T take away from it, only add value to it. The absence of added value is not a loss as eveything would just stay the same.
I'll bet parties aren't fun for him.
Slashdot humor aside for a moment, it's truly a great honour to be recognized by one's country, and Matthias ought to be proud of the accomplishments of himself and the KDE community.
Keep up the good work Matthias and all the KDE folks. You deserve this, and your efforts are appreciated (though sorry, slashdot doesn't give out Crosses of Merit, yet)
The opinions expressed here are those of this individual, and may not reflect the policy or practice of the collective
Kind of ironic, given, umm, World War II and stuff, which country seems more free now.
But that represents such a freer mindset than exists in the USA. I can't imagine in my wildest dreams the highest national medal of the US going to a libre software person. It would take Linus Torvalds being elected our President ... and even then, he'd have no way to push this past Congress.
And, I'm not saying that just because I happen to be a Republican...
I'm saying that, as, a practical matter of bringing about world peace, its awfully hard to hate the Germans when they've done such a wonderful job through the years with KDE and KDevelop. There's a world peace argument to be made for that. How many hundreds of thousands of people use KDE?
Now, can they finish KDevelop 4, PLEASE. :-)
This is my sig.
"I think KDE and Gnome together really screwed the community by picking such bad languages and platforms"
Are you a fucking retard? C and C++ are bad languages??
Although I don't normally use the Big Two, when I have, the only positive experiences I've ever had, have been with KDE.
Despite its' bloat, the system is absolutely gorgeous visually, and to my mind has been ahead of XP in that department almost since its' inception. Konqueror is also the single most versatile and powerful file manager that I've ever used. Local file management and remote web browsing in two panes of the same window are awesome, but it is still more versatile than IE as well, in terms of the number of different modes, and the integration with Konsole that it allows.
Although it isn't much, KDE is also closer in design terms to the UNIX philosophy as well; the different parts are more cleanly encapsulated than GNOME, and it's more self-contained, as well.
It isn't the more popular of the two major DEs, presumably due to not being Stallman-approved for the entirety of its' history...but it is overwhelmingly the better one.
pls dun feed th trolls ty hth hand
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And KDE's pick of a non-FOSS toolkit to build on was a grave error that could have done enormous damage.
Its' lack of Stallman's approval has enormously harmed KDE's degree of uptake and use, yes.
I continue to pray for the end of the Free Software Foundation. If Stallman and its' other members truly wanted to help their fellow man at this point, they would voluntarily dissolve the organisation, and withdraw into anonymity.
KDE was founded by open sourcers, not free software evangelists, as such, it was founded on a pragmatic base. Qt was one of the best GUI toolkits at the time and KDE got a free-as-in-beer deal to use it, the devs acknowledged that the whole wasn't open but (shock, horror) they thought producing a working Desktop Environment to be more important then rewriting Qt from scratch (that was on a roadmap I believe, but it was low priority). GNOME came into existence by the Free Software people who couldn't bare having proprietary code touching their hardware, not exactly the most compelling reason to start a DE project.
As for the snipe about languages... What do you propose, Python? Ruby? (Ignoring the fact that neither existed in a usable form) Perl? People always bitch about C++ but that language is ultimately as messy or clean as you make it (Don't do stupid crap, use simpler constructs when they're good enough), although I suspect you also think not having to declare variables before you use them is a good idea (blech — almost the definition of write-once-read-never code). I'm not going to criticise GNOME's choice of C either, the more off putting thing is the absurd superiority complexes that the coders often seem to have despite the code being longer and often more complicated than the C++/other equivalent (without being faster either). The real crime on their part is GLib GObject, it's object-oriented C and is more ugly then Satan's backside — if you're going to use C then use C, don't half-ass C++ features into it.
Well, one of them is. (It's the one with the OO strap-on, of course.) High-level programming needn't necessarily be LISP, but can at least be less sucky than C++.
C, OTOH, is a perfectly good systems language; I'm with you there. He is a fucking retard.
Of course there was. Look at xlib, for example. /ducks. and runs. like there is no tomorrow.
I wonder if he used his British accent to accept this award?
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
People always bitch about C++ but that language is ultimately as messy or clean as you make it (Don't do stupid crap, use simpler constructs when they're good enough)
This is what it comes down to with any language that doesn't deliberately limit the coder with enforced abstraction. Just do not do retarded stuff. And don't let terrible programmers use languages that give them low-level control. Even better - don't let terrible programmers write programs.
.
On the topic of the Mr Ettritch, well I think that's pretty cool. Nice to hear a story about someone dedicating years of effort to something constructive and getting recognition from authorities outside his field. I use GNOME, but still, good on him. High-five mate
He also got the Golden Wall and Fence medal from Ballmare. For supporting windows and gates.
Qt is LGPL now, quit your whining.
Except US Corporate titles (except CEO) are not worth the paper they are printed on.
Are you a fucking retard? C and C++ are bad languages??
Only from an engineering and systems design point of view. Otherwise they're fine.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
Gnome doesn't need any more beating while that MS employee is still in the project itself.
This is what it comes down to with any language that doesn't deliberately limit the coder with enforced abstraction. Just do not do retarded stuff. And don't let terrible programmers use languages that give them low-level control. Even better - don't let terrible programmers write programs.
Ok, so now we're down to about me and 99 other programmers being allowed to program. What shall we do now? What's that? Raise our rates??? Wellll ok then!
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
and we have all seen what happened to that GNU created hero (!) after he went to Novell. Do you really want to raise this "proprietary" crap for sure? Even GNU Debian Linux (there is a reason for that name) got infected by his wannabe framework (!) because of some trivial note taking application.
Now multi billion mobile/services giant Nokia, who doesn't need money like poor Trolltech has made the project free/GPL. I don't see any "Qt is proprietary" trolls cheering. It was so wrong to ask for money while companies making millions/billions with your full fledged framework isn't it? For example, Google, Adobe, Last.fm doesn't need to pay?
GNU's biggest mistake was making that trojan guy a hero while he didn't deserve it. He was just another person, a MS reject who did 1000th clone of Norton Commander, that is all.
Well I guess the allies liberated Germany, but I guess they never got round to liberating the US :P. (Oh and the CAPTCHA word was medals, ironically enough).
> Yes, we love KDE that much.
Precisely. Difficult to put what I feel in words so simple yet so powerful.
KDE is lovable like that old multipurpose Swiss knife one gets as birthday gift. Always there, always trustworthy (version 3, that is, version 4.x is shaping up nicely -- now!).
Not only KDE is sophisticated, but KDE people are always gentle. When did a KDE developer got angry responding to critics? They're the first to recognize problems, fixable or not, and they take their time to explain where they're going, too -- because there is a explainable plan.
Don't know the guy, but from his very early post ( http://www.kde.org/announcements/announcement.php ), one may think his frank, open tone somehow attracted the same kind of "dreamer" folks.
Thank you very much, Matthias, for sharing your dream with other developers -- who together made it all happen -- and with us, KDE users.
I know mailservers that died in the great flamewar of '98. I think they are still a bit sensitive about it.
It was rather for the Qt fork called Harmony than for Gnome:
http://www.kde.org/whatiskde/qt.php
I continue to pray for the end of the Free Software Foundation. If Stallman and its' other members truly wanted to help their fellow man at this point, they would voluntarily dissolve the organisation, and withdraw into anonymity.P. how would that help their fellow man? - i don't follow
Ah , Godwin's Law
Slipping shoelaces ?
Don't get too comfortable with that Idea, we just finished 11 years of governments that brought us the RFID chip in the passport, finger prints in passports, a half year of storing of all connection data, and who tried to bring us the infamous "stop" sign for censoring the Internet.
KDE was founded by open sourcers, not free software evangelists, as such, it was founded on a pragmatic base. Qt was one of the best GUI toolkits at the time and KDE got a free-as-in-beer deal to use it,
There was also wxWidgets (wxWindows), it was quite usable and IIRC LGPL and with Lyx Mr Ettritch, also choose the non-free XForms toolkit. In that sense it's quite ironic that he gets a medal for his contribution to free software. That aside and although I don't use it, KDE is certainly a nice piece of work and nowadays, with all the licensing issues resolved, there's nothing more to complain about. Congratulations to Mr. Ettritch!
Congratulations!
you case-insensitive clod!
Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize was an absolute farce
I think that as a slight overstatement. I've got to agree that after I heard of it my first reaction was "WHAT?! Shouldn't they like... Wait that he has accomplished something??" and this coming from a left wing activist (perhaps 'far left' by american standards but then again, I don't live there). I think that people all around the world had similar reactions.
However, after giving it some thought, I can see some reasoning for that. A lot of his campaigning was about drawing out from illegal war and occupation, which he still (to my knowledge) plans to do. His speeched were (with little to no exceptions) about uniting the currently divided nation. It's propably impossible to accomplish, but at least a lot of people found his speeches inspiring. He has been campaigning for tighter nuclear proliferation treaties (and has the power to make this happen). He has given UN back a lot of the respect and authority it had pre-G.W.B. era. He is internationally loved and has raised the status of USA in the eyes of other countries by a massive amount. He has made US support for Pakistan dependent on their efforts to fight against terrorism (I don't personally like this but I see how some people could)... The list could be continued.
I don't think that Obama should have gotten the prize, at least yet. I would have wanted to wait for the actual nuclear weapon related treaties to be made first and would have loved to see some real effort on the Israel/Palestina issue as USA would have the authority to solve it (seeing how Israel is financially very dependant on USA support). It would have beeen great to see him lift the restrictions regarding Cuba (though he has lifted some - postal services between USA and Cuba work again) and I could really continue this list for a long time.
Even so, he did have some merits for that so I think that "farce" is an overstatement.
If you think the birth certificate people are bad now, just wait for what they'll do to a Torvalds presidency.
> Except if it wasn't for GNOME Qt would still be proprietary.
Speculation. It might have happened anyways. It might even have happened sooner if GNOME wasn't around to steal the Linux desktop spotlight. Or someone might have built a Free clone of the Qt API.
Log in or piss off.
You mean the Harmony Project? Which probably was the cause of QT eventually going GPL? (not LGPL..)
IMHO, KDE depending on QT was a bad decision. It ignored the fatal flaws in the licensing, until the eventual cooperation of TrollTech. It led to the creation of Mandrake (because Redhat wouldn't touch QT), the fracturing of the Linux desktop (Debian wouldn't touch QT either) and may very well have set back the Linux Desktop long enough that it will never be relevant.
It's a long and messy history. It wasn't until January of this year that they FINALLY went LGPL. Finally having a license appropriate for a toolkit on the Linux Desktop. It only took a decade.
Because the FSF causes a lot of division. I've suggested BSD licensed software in different forms here before, and any posts which do so immediately get modded down.
Stallman's followers are paranoid about ensuring that nobody uses any FOSS under any license other than the GPL. Bradley Kuhn has said that he thinks the GPL is the only FOSS license that should exist.
Stallman has exceptionally narrow ideas about the way things should be, and anyone who disagrees with said ideas, gets shouted down, harassed, called names, and repressed by his followers.
My original post here got modded down. Every time I write anything here which they disagree with, they mod it down in order to try and ensure nobody reads it, while some of them also respond and call me names. If I'm just trolling, as they claim, you have to wonder why they feel it's worth the effort of suppressing what I write, as well.
The fact that they do that, also hurts Linux's image with people outside the FOSS community as well.
The FSF are a cult, and a harmful one, and we'd be a lot better off without them.
I thought Germany's greatest honor was meeting David Hasselhoff.
Wouldn't Obama be more deserving? He did speak in Berlin once.
an ill wind that blows no good
Mattias
Thank you and the entire KDE team for a nice desktop environment. Your vision and dedication deserves this award.
My desktop has been KDE for a several years, and I always like it. The early KDE4 in Kubuntu 9.04 was fragile and broken in many ways. I almost gave up on it, but decided to give it a shot in the one week old Kubuntu 9.10 (karmic) which has KDE 4.3.2. I can say it is usable again, and I am exploring the new features and liking them.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
PLEASE get KDE 4 back on track to being as useful as KDE 3.5.10 and take sagio out and bury him and the dolphin with the fishes!
KDE is bar none the best X WM out there, but KDE 4.x is doing nothing but hurting all the ground made up during the 3.5.x releases.
NO, I do NOT want my desktop as a widget
NO, I do NOT want dolphin as anything except as tuna bait
The "look" of KDE is just fine, move on!
Konqueror is the BROWSER and the FILE MANAGER, now RESTORE all the features you ripped out of Konqi so it can be used again.
1311393600 - Back to Black
I know... But you can't blame poor old C++ or any other language just because people abuse it.
It might even have happened sooner if GNOME wasn't around to steal the Linux desktop spotlight.
Spotlights are easy enough to steal, but the KDE developers have done themselves no favours by adopting a model where the desktop is only a place where widgets or launchers may be dropped.
I have played with KDE on and off since 1998, and found it to be usable but a bit Kluttered and Kannoying. I have more or less got over that now, but the navel-gazing in the philosophy behind KDE4.x leaves me bemused, even if it does make sense to the developers. As far as I'm concerned, the desktop is a place where one should be able to drop anything I want, and if I have to invoke a file manager to see that file again then something isn't working right.
If, however, what I've seen is an artifact of the distributions I've used (Arch and Slackware Linux), I will be very happy to hear of a decent implementation.
You really haven't kept up with KDE 4.x development, have you. In 4.2+ You can put whatever you want on the desktop, whether it be widgets, icons, os x dashboard applets, etc. If you drag an image to the desktop, it asks you if you want to create an icon, an image viewer applet, set the background, etc. And if you want the plain-old file-manager-pane behviour back for the whole desktop, simply right click and change the desktop type.
Cheers
Arschloch.
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
Heil Hitler
Heil ihn doch selbst!
(German joke)
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
> Kind of ironic, given, umm, World War II and stuff, which country seems more free now.
World War II has been discussed to death, and it gets boring. It's just 12 damn years out of 1200 of German history. Besides of the fact that we will (because of these 12 years) never allow Austrians to make politics here again, I find the Weimar Republic, the imperial period and the troublesome centuries that led to them much more interesting in regards to how we attained our freedom oriented mindset. These were the times when we tried to find our identity as a nation state while everyone else was up and running and busy building colonies in Africa. Before 1871, travel was hard because a patchwork of microstates existed where our nation is today. Yes, that has probably resulted in our upholding of individual freedom.
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
There was a real choice of FOSS toolkits back then?
There was wxWidgets, plus several other ones.
But he shouldn't have picked C++ in the first place.
KDE was founded by open sourcers, not free software evangelists, as such, it was founded on a pragmatic baseGNOME came into existence by the Free Software people who couldn't bare having proprietary code touching their hardware, not exactly the most compelling reason to start a DE project.
Choosing a QPL-licensed toolkit wasn't pragmatic, it was idiotic. The QPL/GPL dual license meant that developing commercial Linux desktop apps cost a lot of money, while developing for Microsoft and Macintosh was nearly free. How was Linux supposed to compete like that? Gtk+ has been free even for commercial software development since its inception.
As for the snipe about languages... What do you propose
I don't "snipe" about languages, I'm telling you outright.
What should they have used? Almost anything. Even creating a simple compiled language is less work than all the crap that Qt added to C++.
People always bitch about C++ but that language is ultimately as messy or clean as you make it
KDE's bug database contains 2461 bugs related to crashes. Almost all of those simply would not exist if that code was written in a decent language.
The real crime on their part is GLib GObject, it's object-oriented C and is more ugly then Satan's backside -- if you're going to use C then use C, don't half-ass C++ features into it.
Qt commits exactly the same crime by layering its own object system on top of C++; it just hides it a little better using C++ syntax. Both tradeoffs are bad.
although I suspect you also think not having to declare variables before you use them is a good idea
You're really so inexperienced that the only languages that come to your mind are Ruby, Perl, C, and C++? You really can't imagine languages that actually work better?
This is what it comes down to with any language that doesn't deliberately limit the coder with enforced abstraction.
Nonsense. The problem with C++ is not that it provides access to unsafe features (lots of languages do that), it's that it doesn't separate unsafe from safe features.
Even better - don't let terrible programmers write programs.
Anybody who thinks they can handle C/C++ is a terrible programmer.
After reading many comments on here, I've got to wonder if some will complain just for the sake of complaining. Blah, blah, blah, KDE wasn't totally free, Blah, blah, blah, KDE didn't do this or that ..... who cares already that's the past, how about focusing on what KDE is nowadays. The most recent version is very usable, and I would rate it as one of the best desktops to use.
However, back in 1996, basically the only available toolkit besides Qt was Tk. GTK+, Fltk and others are newer. wxWidgets (wxWindows back then) didn't have native widgets, Motif was fully closed, etc, so choice of Qt probably was reasonable.
Got Pike?
You really haven't kept up with KDE 4.x development, have you... if you want the plain-old file-manager-pane behviour back for the whole desktop, simply right click and change the desktop type.
:-|
Actually, I had kept track, I was simply unaware of the helpful hint you just supplied. I was a bit frustrated because with Gnome (or my currently preferred combo of Compiz Fusion with Gnome) you can also put whatever widgets you want on your desktop, which to me is primarily a place I use to drop whatever files I happen to be working on at the moment. In other words, I treat it the same way I do my physical dead-tree item of furniture.
Over the years I have seen a lot of egregious cockups on both sides of the Gnome/KDE border, where developers have blithely followed the latest trendy philosophical notion while creating unnecessary productivity hurdles on the way, and it seemed to me that this development was another craniorectal idiocy designed to exclude the way I prefer to work. Happy to know there's a workaround.
Incidentally, it seems some idiot has decided to orphan your post in his haste to push his agenda by modding down the post to which you replied...
Congrats.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
No, but you can blame people for using C++.