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...

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.

Re:Wait, what?

[icebike]

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

Better than a coat of paint.

Re:Hmm...

[Jesus_666]

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

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: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)

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.