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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Kongratulations!

[Penguinshit]

My kompliments...

Hmm...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Shouldn't they have given him the German Federal Kross of Merit?

Posted from Konqueror.

Re:Hmm...

[Jesus_666]

Well, the German word for "cross" ("Kreuz") already starts with a K. Yes, we love KDE that much.

Re:Ha

[noundi]

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.

Re:Ha

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Miguel de Icaza has already received one of the highest American honors: a corporate vice-presidency.

Runner up

[Capmaster]

This is really just consolation for the Nobel Peace Prize he was supposed to win.

Wait, what?

[Anonymous Psychopath]

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?

Re:Wait, what?

[icebike]

Wouldn't that also make it the least prestigious general decoration?

Better than a coat of paint.

The bad news

[ChienAndalu]

He received it as a plasmoid and it crashed his desktop. But it looks nice.

Re:Ha

[everynerd]

I bet you're fun at parties.

It is the least prestigious..

[henni16]

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.

Re:It is the least prestigious..

[Marcika]

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.

It is the lowest class - but the lower classes are way more prestigious, since the highest classes are only awarded to politicians and their personal friends (rather than people of merit)...

Re:not that happy

[Ash-Fox]

And KDE's pick of a non-FOSS toolkit to build on was a grave error that could have done enormous damage.

There was a real choice of FOSS toolkits back then?

Re:Ha

[straponego]

QPLists? Fuck me. Say what you want about the tenets of the GPL, but at least it's an ethos!

On the other side of the fence

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Congratulations Matthias

[yorkshiredale]

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)

Wow, the culture must be very different from U.S.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

For me, there are no Big *Two.*

[petrus4]

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.

Re:For me, there are no Big *Two.*

[xororand]

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.

On the other hand, if you look at it from a developer's side, GTKMM (the C++ interface of GTK) might be closer to the UNIX philosophy of "do one thing only, and do that right". While Qt reinvents the wheel so many times, by using its own classes for many things, like QString or QThread, or by implementing its own slot & signal system with a C++ preprocessor, GTKMM uses standard and existing libraries wherever possible.

Qt: QString, QList, QVector
GTKMM: std::string, std::list, std::vector

Qt: Signal handling with macros and its own custom C++ preprocessor
GTKMM: libsigc++, template-based signal handling

Of course that's just one way of looking at it but I wouldn't call any of the two less close to the UNIX philosophy. On the end user's side, both have an abstract VFS to file management on remote resources, etc...

That said, kongratulations, Matthias! I hope this award encourages others to dedicate their time for the greater good.

Re:For me, there are no Big *Two.*

[c]

> While Qt reinvents the wheel so many times, by using its own classes
> for many things, like QString or QThread, or by implementing its own
> slot & signal system with a C++ preprocessor

They started writing Qt in 1991. I don't know about you, but I was writing C++ on Linux/Unix throughout the 90's, and if you weren't reinventing the wheel and writing your own class libraries, you were either paying a lot of cash for someone else's toolkit or you weren't writing portable code.

I'm sure the situation has improved immensely, but old habits like that...

c.

Re:not that happy

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:He deserves it more than Obama / Gore do.

[petrus4]

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.

Will Gnome 3 link to Mono?

[Ilgaz]

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.