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

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 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.