The Role of a Nonprofit In Open Source Development

jrepin writes KDE is among the biggest open source projects which continues to innovate and evolve with the changing times. Often we have seen this particular community create technologies ahead of its time which were later adopted by other projects. The Linux Foundation talked to Lydia Pintscher, the president of the KDE e.V., the nonprofit organization that oversees the legal and financial aspects of the KDE project, to understand the relationship between the community and the organization. We also discussed the challenge of recruiting more women to open source projects and women in the KDE community.

Comments

Why Gnome?

[hcs_$reboot]

KDE is among the biggest open source projects which continues to innovate and evolve with the changing times

So why main distribs mainly offer Gnome as a first gui?

Re:Why Gnome?

[invictusvoyd]

I'd say why KDE or Gnome. People who are not comfortable with xfce or fluxbox or icewm should switch to windows .

Re:Why Gnome?

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed... the best Linux desktop experience is at Xfce. KDE and GNOME are slow and buggy. If you want such bells-and-whistles desktop, Windows works much better for that purpose.

Re:Why Gnome?

[DoofusOfDeath]

I've really been enjoying Cinnamon. I had been using Gnome 2. Then Ubuntu went off the rails with Gnome 3 and Unity. I've found KDE 3+ to be a little odd for me, in terms of look and feel. Things like Fluxbox and Icewm seemed a bit spare for my liking. Cinnamon was just what I was looking for.

Re:Why Gnome?

[ArhcAngel]

But Cinnamon isn't free...at least she wasn't the last time I talked to her.

Re:Why Gnome?

[Kjella]

So why main distribs mainly offer Gnome as a first gui?

Mainly the history of Qt I think. Up until 2009 it was a dual GPL/commercial license until it went LGPL. That meant that other companies felt Trolltech/Nokia would have too much control over proprietary GUI application development. Now that's a while ago, but long enough that both Red Hat and Canonical had already picked Gnome. And once you do it's natural that the pro-Gnome developers gather there and the rest leave, so the internal resistance to switch is too great. Maybe if someone started a fresh distro and made KDE "trendy" since openSUSE doesn't seem to have the right appeal, but I don't see who'd do that today. I think everybody's waiting for Google to get their act together and swoop in with an Android/Chromebook solution that really hurts Microsoft/Apple on the desktop, unless you think you can upstage Google and get there first I wouldn't invest in a Linux distro today.

Re:Why Gnome?

[marcosdumay]

No idea at all.

I'm calling it Red-Hattitis, expecting it to be a kind of mental disorder. But if somebody does really know what's the cause, I'l love to hear.

Re:Why Gnome?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe if someone started a fresh distro and made KDE "trendy"

I have been watching the progress of Chakra with much interest.

Re:Why Gnome?

[Rob Y.]

Mint's KDE flavor is very nice already. The only problem with KDE these days is it's original 'too much configurability' issue. Yes, it may be hard to believe, but KDE has actually proven that there can be too much configurabilitty (or at least too much to present routinely to casual users).

People complain about certain aspects of KDE - especially the search indexer, but distros don't have to include it all.

Re:Why Gnome?

[mister_playboy]

Agreed... the best Linux desktop experience is at Xfce.

As long as you have no need for tear-free video playback, anyway.

Don't get me wrong, I've got XFCE on one my own machines. But still having this sort of show-stopper issue in 2015, on open source Intel graphics no less, is embarrassing to Linux.

Re:Why Gnome?

[Anonymous Coward]

UPVOTE PARENT. Did this get fixed in Xfce 4.12?

Why

[_Sharp'r_]

We also discussed the challenge of recruiting more women to open source projects and women in the KDE community.

Why?

How about asking about the challenges of recruiting more GUI designers, or more programmers, or more QA testers, or more of some group KDE specifically needs more of. Why ask about women?

It's almost like there's some sort of additional agenda beyond just interviewing the KDE folks....

Re:Why

[DoofusOfDeath]

It's almost like there's some sort of additional agenda beyond just interviewing the KDE folks....

Are you serious??? Slashdot clearly is not interested in posting stories about getting more women into computing.

I've been begging them for years to run more stories like that, but the editors always tell me that they just don't generate enough click traffic.

Re:Why

[AmiMoJo]

Because the person being interviewed has worked to attract more women to open source and KDE, with some positive results. Others may wish to learn from her experiences and considered opinion.

Re:Why

[Anonymous Coward]

If only they would run at least one story on that subject every day, then I think it would really help to get women interested in computer careers. But Slashdot simply refuses to acknowledge the issue at all.

Re:Why

[BarbaraHudson]

It's the same mentality that we see at the Oscars - men are asked all sorts of questions, women are asked about their dresses.

FTFA:

We have often seen such incidents which require a very thick skin to survive. As a journalist I have grown a thick skin, but not everyone wants that. We risk losing talented people because of the social nature of some communities. And that's where community members can make a huge difference. One bad apple should not rot the entire community.

Pintscher says, "When you see someone being a jerk, say something because this is not just about the two people directly involved - it is also about everyone else who is watching that conversation and making up their mind about contributing to the project or not. There are so many little things you can do that make things better overall."

She then recalls an incident from her past where someone's little act made a huge difference to her. "The most enlightening moment for me was years ago at a conference: I was standing with a group of guys and another guy joined. Someone introduced everyone. Everyone except me. I am sure they didn't mean any harm, but in a movement that so heavily relies on personal connections to get anything done this is a huge bummer. Someone else then quickly introduced me as well and all was good. You can be that someone. These little things make a huge difference."

So much for not having a thick skin. Maybe you weren't introduced because they thought you already knew the person? Or they didn't know your name and didn't want to say "and here's whats-her-name." People should wear name tags at such events because odds are if you're meeting 50 people, you've forgotten 45 of their names within seconds of being introduced.

"Standing up" is confrontational, and assumes offense where, as in this case, she admits no offense was even intended. The way to deal with this is particular case was to just introduce yourself.

Now, in the case of blatant, intentional moronic behavior, that's a different story. But this wasn't the case here, and to use it as an example was poor judgment.

There are huge problems with sexism in tech, but there are also more than enough blatant examples that we don't need to look for one that trivializes the whole issue.

Re:Why

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot simply refuses to acknowledge the issue at all.

The only issue here is the sexist mentality behind those kinds of submissions and stories. The thought of one's gender as a qualification for a position of any kind is absolutely disgusting. Same goes for discrimination based on other things such as ethnicity and age.

I've always had the impression that human rights advocates universally object to discrimination, but during the latest year I've seen many examples against this. Things like "affirmative action" (also called "positive discrimination", essentially means favoring minorities or disadvantaged groups) and "recruiting women" are marketed and viewed in a positive light by many, which is alarming. The "50/50" argument also has a worrying amount of support, but I suspect that many of the supporters simply haven't thought about it properly and aren't actually advocating sexism to achieve a 50% representation of both genders.

Re:Why

[pr0fessor]

I think the point she was getting at wasn't that she was forgotten but that someone went out of their way to make sure she was included.

Re:Why

[BarbaraHudson]

Nevertheless, for someone who claimed to have a thick skin, she was remarkably thin-skinned over something she said herself was not intentional. It was a very poor example, and trivializes the real problems.

Re:Why

[pr0fessor]

Poor example yes, but I think it was more of a plug to promote her community than anything else. I'm not disagreeing I just think there was a different motive behind the story, It was feel good message.

Re:Why

[BarbaraHudson]

I Have to agree. It was a real puff piece, short on hard questions.

Re:Why

[duck_rifted]

Are YOU serious? Everywhere that has been attempted, instead of a conversation about how to get more women interested in computer science, it becomes a conversation about how to get men OUT. Old fall-backs like scholarships and training only for females isn't going to help here because it will take more than that to get girls interested in computer science early on. Meanwhile, current female computer scientists hijack the topic to increase their own chances of getting hired, so instead of pro-female, it all becomes anti-male.

How about this: the bits between your legs neither make you a better nor worse developer, so the only way it makes sense to even consider that factor is in trying to reverse the sexist and stupid perception that computer science is for males. That's cultural, and it doesn't result from pretending that somehow having either kind of genitalia matters to the computer.

I'm starting to get bored with this recent trend that just because an article, post, or discussion mentions women, somehow that gives it more merit. No. Disagreeing with an article that happens to have a gendered term in it does not somehow magically satisfy the requirements for sexism. This crap of, "If you don't like this writing, or you disagree with this topic then you don't care about females," is a cheap social hack that is every bit as invalid and nonsense as it is temporary and annoying.

Re:Why

[duck_rifted]

That's not the only issue. The other issue is that it doesn't actually get women interested in computer science. Nobody is going to decide, "Oh, I better learn this highly technical, challenging skill because Go Team Genitalia Like Mine!" For people to learn challenging skills requires that those skills have a practical application that matters to them, and if income were enough then we wouldn't be having this conversation.

How about a social website that is a blank slate with a highly accessible API that allows people to basically create their own kind of site on their profile? Give it simple syntax and semantics, like Javascript, and make it easily extensible so that people can customize their own pages for talking about themselves and their lives. Then, just make sure that sleaze balls like the robots and sociopaths running Facebook can't touch it.

How about that? An obvious application for the Java replacement tech firms wish they had and a way for them to compete with Facebook at the same time as motivating females to learn to program for a practical task that has already been proven to reach their demographic. It's almost like if we stop accusing each other of sexism and have a single constructive thought about the actual task of getting more women interested in computer science, then we have at least one thought that's actually on topic. Who'd have thunk it?

Re:Why

[DoofusOfDeath]

Are YOU serious?

No. Whooosh!!! :)

Re:Why

[duck_rifted]

You're going to be down-modded because the trend now is that if you actually think about this topic then you're a bigot.

What people don't seem to be seeing is that nobody is going to devote their time, work, and some measure of their sanity to going about their normal lives at the same time as learning a very technical skill unless that skill can benefit them in a way that is relevant to their needs and interests. Nobody studies Quantum Electrodynamics just because there aren't enough people in their demographic doing it. And because we have this little thing called culture that we like to pretend doesn't exist, the way to do that differs between demographics. You know, exactly like how every single marketing firm ever in the history of marketing has already accepted without devolving all their work into arguing and accusing each other of sexism.

The biggest problem with the discussion of how to get more women interested in computing is that people are so. damn. immature. that they can't discuss the actual topic at all. It all devolves into some kindergarten excuse to lash out at each other, meanwhile absolutely zero progress is actually made because people can't get over their social hypersensitivity enough to even acknowledge that maybe there's a culture giving rise to sexually disproportionate representation in some fields because culture has an impact upon different demographics in different ways.

No, no. Sorry. That's a sexist thing for me to say. What I mean to say is that we're all grey-colored neuter people from the same place and same family, and no group of people who can be described with language shares any cultural commonalities whatsoever. Because apparently that's the only asinine fantasy opinion that anybody is allowed to have anymore.

Re:Why

[duck_rifted]

Absolutely whoosh! Sorry; I've just gotten annoyed because these people who are just using this topic as an excuse to lash out at each other are making the actual topic of how to get more women interested in computer science totally unapproachable. Instead of, "What do you think, everyone, how do we work together to do this hard thing?" It's, "OMG! We have to figure out how to do this hard thing together, but nobody is allowed to talk about it and all it really means is that if I mention it, I'm automatically right about everything I say."

Authors who have to fall back on that kind of crutch should just stop writing, and people who think they'll solve complicated social problems by making everybody afraid to mention them are the reason those problems exist in the first place. The best strategy a sexist person can employ today is to pretend to hate sexist people, and people are apparently actually so stupid and impulsive that the majority are falling for it.

End. Of. Rant. I'm sorry. I just had to get that out because *not* saying it has been making this topic fester in my brain to the point that it's actually starting to piss me off.

Re:Why

[DoofusOfDeath]

No worries. An occasional good rant gets the carbon buildup out of your cylinders.

Re:Why

[duck_rifted]

And that can be a vital process. I have a bad habit of tuning out everything I feel to focus on programming until those cylinders are about ready to lock up. It feels great to take a break and get it out once in a while. Thanks for understanding! :)

Re:Why

[DoofusOfDeath]

No problem. I've listened to a lot of Car Talk episodes, and Tommy (RIP) gave me a good appreciation for a proper rant.

Re:Why

[CAPSLOCK2000]

Why ask about women?

Because KDE was one of the first free software projects to focus on involving more women. They KDE Women mailinglist archive goes back to 1998. Given the recent attention for that subject it seems like a good idea to ask KDE about their experience.

Re:Why

[Anonymous Coward]

The other issue is that it doesn't actually get women interested in computer science. [...] the actual task of getting more women interested in computer science

This right here is what I don't understand. Why do we need to get women or any other group of people interested in computer science? Why should we market the field specifically to them and actively try to get these certain groups more involved? Is there something special about these groups that justifies the resources allocated to outreach programs that target these specific demographics instead of just recruiting from the general population? For example, is there a proportionally larger amount of talented people within these groups compared to the general population?

Often when these stories do reach the front page they are presented with the unquestioned premise that outreach programs are a good thing and that there should be more of them because the computing field doesn't have enough people who belong to group X. The questions I asked above are put forth and are answered with one thing, which is apparently a skeleton key of some sort: diversity (and sometimes equality). In this context these equal to "in my opinion the field doesn't have enough people who belong to group X". And we're back to square one, the questions from my first paragraph get asked again.

Eventually someone states that members of group X bring a wealth of diverse opinions and perspectives to the field. You know, as if those perspectives don't get considered by people outside of group X. Because no one outside of group X couldn't possibly have the same sort of ideas that members of group X have, right?

Please understand that I'm not accusing you of anything personally. I'm just tired of having opinions shoved down my throat as facts and then constructive discussion called for with these unsubstantiated claims as the premise. I agree that constructive discussion is needed, but the starting topic should be "should we focus a disproportionate amount of resources to attract and recruit members of specific groups to the field of computing".

Re:Why

[duck_rifted]

I like how this was modded "Troll", just like any time I mention some mistakes the GOP is making. If you can't form a rational argument, just slander people you disagree with, right?

Re:Why

[Anonymous Coward]

Has there been any progress attracting women to be Waste Management Technicians or attracting men to romance novels?

What if, and this is just a shot in the dark so bear with me, what if we stop being sexist and just let women and men have the same opportunity to go and do things they're interested in, and not get upset if women or men gravitate more strongly to different things?

Think about it: It's patronizing to suggest that women just aren't capable of taking the same path that men have taken to get into open source. It's also quite retarding to imagine that men (most of whom are severely attracted to women) wouldn't like more women around...

What if we accept there may be trends in the graphs of female and male preference for a job? Graphs can even include outliers. What if we just welcome all who participate without trying to change natural human preference to match some idyllic goal in the ratio of women to men? That, or we can mandate that teenage boys read romance novels, and teen girls Hussler; And when we're done with that, we'll have gender quotas for more men as teachers, counselors, etc. and more women as garbage collectors, construction workers, and paid-less-than-average coders/gamedevs.

What about the Pima Indians?

[NotDrWho]

Did you know that KDE doesn't have a *SINGLE* Pima Indian developer? Not *ONE*! What is being done to attract more Pima Indians to the KDE development community? And why hasn't KDE made ANY efforts to reach out to the Pima Indian community to encourage young Pima Indians to become KDE developers?

Re:What about the Pima Indians?

[amalcolm]

I doubt you've ever seen a real tit except your mother's, loser

What if we worry about

[nrasch]

Every time I see one of these women/minority/Eskimo comments in computer science/math/name-your-subject I can't help but thinking....

How about if we worry more what's between people's ears and not so much about what's between their legs?

Also, I'd like to know why there isn't a movement to get more women into the plumbing, ditch digging, and roofing arts. Last I checked these critical fields were mostly male dominated, and I'm sure we need to start throwing some bucks at diversity efforts for the sexes in these industries

Re:What if we worry about

[serviscope_minor]

How about if we worry more what's between people's ears and not so much about what's between their legs?

Um that's entirely the point. The trouble is that the rest of the world does, in fact, seem to care more about genetalia than anything else.

and I'm sure we need to start throwing some bucks at diversity efforts for the sexes in these industries

Go ahead. Or do you actually mean that other people should do the legwork while you whine on the internet?

Re:What if we worry about

[Anonymous Coward]

and I'm sure we need to start throwing some bucks at diversity efforts for the sexes in these industries

Go ahead. Or do you actually mean that other people should do the legwork while you whine on the internet?

Wow, that's ridiculous. You took for serious what was an obviously facetious suggestion.

Perhaps they're suggesting that we follow the lead of, Norway, voted the Most Equal Country in the World, and accept that there will be cross cultural (thus not socialized) gender differences in human behaviour. As noted in this Norwegian Documentary on Gender Differences, it would be foolish to think that the same sexual dimorphism that shaped our very different bodies (right down to internal organs and stem cell counts) would have zero effect on one of the largest and most expensive organs, The Brain.

That, or we can just keep ignoring reality and demonizing institutions as rampantly sexist without evidence to support the extraordinary claim.

Re:only women with

[amalcolm]

I doubt you've ever seen a real pair or tits except your mother's, loser

Profit is immoral.

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody should do things only because they enjoy doing them. The idea of working as a means to an end is a ridiculous waste of time. Most wealthy people don't labour for a living, unless they enjoy their labour - they use some of their money to pay people to invest the rest of their money, and lounge around on yachts. The rest of society needs to do as they do, not as they say.