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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...
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.
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.
He received it as a plasmoid and it crashed his desktop. But it looks nice.
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.
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)
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
No, the Germans named all their awards the same and make a difference just by the level. The Federal Cross of Merit thus has nine levels. (I am still trying to find out which level he got.)
And, I'm not saying that just because I happen to be a Republican...
This is true. Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize was an absolute farce, and you could tell that he knew that himself.
I don't view Obama as a monster, but he is no saviour, and no Messiah either.
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
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.
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.
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