I have no idea if I'm an outlier, but with a blind preference for intellectual depth, rigor, and creativity, I tend to see what I figured was normal: more experienced candidates often come out ahead. Not always, but often. More experience unsurpisingly equals more age. The best are often bringing decades of experience, MA or PhD level credentials, and the ineffable things that come from having been there and done that in a lot of different trenches. They often cost more (though not all that much more), and they're worth it.
I know the corporate world at large has this patrician idea about pay related to seniority - whereas I come from the pay-for-value mindset. There is a good observation in the article about older folks making more and therefore being victims of cost cutting. I'm sure this happens as well, but in my world the observation is meaningless. A senior software engineer will get a good salary - more than enough to support an upper middle-class lifestyle (albeit not at the level of an attorney or an anesthesiologist), regardless of their age. If they ask for too much, they will be unemployed; if they tire of unemployment, they bring their compensation demands back in line with their value. I find most people have a very good grasp of the labor market, especially with the advent of widely available salary suvery data.
I have a couple of friends in their 50's who joke about becoming obsolete. I associate this with actually getting tired of keeping up with an industry that reinvintents itself so often, and therefore, not keeping up. There's a trap there, too: a kind of local maxima where, for a while, being an expert in Cobol or IBM mainframes is not only easier than learning Java, but will pay more and more, as you become more and more rare. Until one day you look for your next job and it just... isn't there.
Historically IT has suffered from a lack of technical depth at the top. Companies wanted wise old hands with management experience in charge, even if those wise old hands needed an assistant to print their emails every day (true story, multiple companies). As the next generation rises through the ranks, you will have more middle management, SVP, and ultimately COO, CEO, etc types that have real first-hand knowledge of technology. Eventually the corporate world will lose some of its notortious and costly blindness towards talent, and both hiring and strategy will become more objective and less bullshit-driven.
Update - Ian Hickson has withdrawn his claims. In a posting to the W3C mailing list he said "I was under the impression (based on [1] and some posts to secret mailing lists) that Larry had filed a formal objection on the 2D Context part of what people outside this working group call HTML5. However, I see Larry has now posted publicly that this is not the case".
My guess, this troublemaking was real, but they are backpedalling now.
Adobe is playing the last cards in their slimy little hand to sabotage HTML5.
Standards bodies either survive attempts by wealthy corporate troublemakers to stop the open standards process, or they become irrelevant.
I can't wait to see Flash finally end. It's been a buggy, annoying tool to work with since it came on the scene. Even so, their reign should have been as endless as Windows - all it would have taken was the slightest bit of good stewardship. Too bad they couldn't even be bothered to keep up with 5-10 year old changes in hardware and operating systems.
It's fitting that Macromedia/Adobe's laziness and arrogance will destroy their grip on the web.
Look, if you're one of those people who can read what the KDE team said at the time and tell me KDE4 was promoted as a developer-only release, or that they did a good job warning people about its problems, that's fine, but I think our conversation is at an end.
The fact is, they let their ego take the wheel, and not only did they fool individuals, but they had a bunch of mainstream distros like Fedora's and Canonical's push KDE4 downstream. By the way, another big reason for this: KDE's decision to no longer support KDE3.
And then they got an opportunity to learn why you shouldn't try to trick people about the state of your project.
It's not clear anyone took that opportunity, but they got it. It's still there for the taking.
If you are such an expert perhaps you'd like to show the developers how its done
And this is exactly my point - so I will make it again.
Can no one say whether music is bad but a good musician?
Can no one talk about football, unless they can walk on the NFL field?
Can no one say, "hey this release is a steaming pile of shit" unless they can write a better one?
I should hope not - what a dangerous, ugly, self-deluded world some people seem to want. But I guess to those people it may be preferable than a threat to the ego. Cest la vie.
Would you make that comment to Linus Torvlads's criticism of KDE4, just because he hasn't written a desktop GUI?
OK - I'll grant you that one illusion.
Nothing illusory about it.
Mail clients alone... ego has eaten more mail than the postal service will deliver today.
Lost job opportunities, missed connections with old friends, that email back from that girl you met at the party last week... poof. All because ego was at the wheel, and someone wanted to call their email client release "stable" when it had confirmed, open critical data loss bugs. And if you think that is hypothetical, the evidence of having done this exact thing in the past is in the bug trackers for both evolution or kmail (just for a start).
If you're prepared to do that archaeology, you can even read the outraged victims words as they appeared. You can read as the developers said "you get what you pay for dude." And the victims said "fine but would it kill you to put a tiny warning label on your little emailovore so that the next poor victims will know better than to use your free software?"
And with this, they are met with silence, because there is no argument against properly warning people against using your own code... except that you can't admit to yourself or the world what state your project is in.
People? I suspect you are the "people"
I thought the Torvlads quote would help show the depth of the backlash against KDE, and therefore address this particular kind of childish response, and actually, until you posted, it did.
As I said elsewhere, I believe the KDE team knows what their mistakes have done to the size of their user base.
The point here is if the KDE team had simply said, instead of
"On 11th January 2008, the KDE Community released the fourth major version of the K Desktop Environment. This release marks the beginning of the KDE 4 era..."
but rather:
"Today's developer release is out. This is bleeding edge; we're still a year or two away from something usable, but this is stabilized to the point where we'd like more developers and power users to come give it a try with their 2nd machines." - which by
I held out with Kubuntu 8.04 (one of the most polished distro releases I've ever seen) for a very long time. But eventually there wasn't a choice, for me at least. Modern equipment doesn't work with old distros and their aging kernels. And I, like most, have to pick my battles. Going against the grain to try to use KDE3 with something more recent wasn't going to be one of them.
Yes, software patents are broken. Yes, Linux has lots of patent vulnerabilities. Beyond that, I can't really understand your point.
Legal issues are all about perception, and in this case, "Linux Hackers" and distros cloning a Microsoft technology with well-publicized patents creates an entirely different perception in the wild-west of the patent-law courtroom than a troll like SCO popping up and trying shake down IBM.
Now, regarding "Miguel never tried to embrace GNOME with Mono. You can't show me any mail/blog post regarding with that." This sounds so obviously and totally untrue that I think this must just be a misunderstanding.
Canonical's Kubuntu pushed the dist upgrade through their (extremely user friendly) UI; that took you from 3 to 4 "way too early." I guess you're saying Canonical was the exception. How many distros made it easy to have "side-by-side" 3-4 setups? Or didn't go to KDE4 until say 4.3?
I would have thought, with what most KDE distros did (push to 4 "early") as well as the high-profile folks whose comments I merely echo, that it would be too plain crazy to claim the KDE made a v4.0 developer release covered in warning labels.. But apparently I would be wrong.
It's only on account of my incredulity about the flexibility of history that I didn't simply pull up archive.org to begin with.
I did a quick CTRL-F for "DO NOT RUN THIS UNLESS YOU'RE PREPARED TO LOSE ALL YOUR DATA." LOL. But in seriousness, can you point out where on this page there is a single hint that there is any "developer-only" aspect to this release?
You know what I see on there?
"KDE 4.0 is the innovative Free Software desktop containing lots of applications for every day use as well as for specific purposes."
You know, and I know, they sold this for all the world as if it were the fully baked successor to KDE3. They did it from day one. They let their ego take the wheel. And then later, when it blew up in their face, they started backtracking. But the damage was done. Had they simply been more humble, and honest, I would have been all -1 Troll from the beginning, and I would have no links, no quotes. Instead. I spent most of this article's life with high scores, and I got about 75% "I agree" comments, regardless of the fact that late moderation has laid waste to my karma - after years here, a first, and an interesting experience.
But it looks like we still haven't all gotten the message. I don't mind getting shot - that's one of the risks of being the messenger. But I hate to see good projects keep getting hurt by this kind of thinking.
I wonder why the folks involved didn't unify the code up front rather than have redundant code and then refactor? Why waste so much effort doing it the wrong way first?
No, that wouldn't have worked, that would have implied it was a continuation of the 3x series.
I fail to see how... if they said it wasn't.
See how your logic breaks down? You might have argued that version numbers are meaningless and don't imply anything - that would also have been wrong, but at least it would have been consistent.
There was NO confusion over who their audience was.
So obviously there was - as you make clear, the version number implied something. In this case, what it implied threw off many users, including Torvalds. It wasn't their only problem - they did not make their warnings as clear as they wish they did in retrospect, I'm sure.
And what about all the distros, by the way - why did they package it and send it downstream to KDE3 users when it wasn't done? Should all these people "end it?"
in the old days, there was no such thing as alpha, beta, and rc1, rc2, whatever. It was "here's branch # such and such"
I'm aware that they explain their (wrong) rationale for numbering in that way. It didn't make anyone any less surprised.
I guess you're saying they did all they can to warn people off. But given the huge mess that this way of thinking made for KDE, I would hope they might be admitting some fault and looking for ways to communicate better. It's not like they were doing anything wrong by having a development release. Teams do it all the time without much of an issue. Communicating this is not rocket science.
But you see the problem is ego. Some folks didn't want to shout out that it was alpha or beta. They didn't want to call it v3.9 or "v4.0 PRERELEASE" or give it a milestone or alternate name, or any of the many things you see every day. And for the same reason, some folks don't want to hear or accept what damage they did to KDE's reputation. I have a guess - that somewhere within the KDE organization, there are stats on how their userbase shrank, perhaps from one or another of their various web services, and they tell the moral of this sad story. But I guess once you start with the denial, you can come up with an explanation for anything, and blame anyone.
So calling it v3.9Alpha would have been asking too much?
What was it, do you think, that made them reject this alternate version number, and go with v4.0 instead?
Surely not a respect for common practices of version numbering.
They made a green stop sign. The disclaimers, IIRC, were not so prominent until after they had already sunk their own reputation with the (totally avoidable) confusion over who their audience was for that release.
You'd be wrong. And I think I made my point pretty well about why you shouldn't feel so bad not to live in a world where positive opinions are the only ones allowed.
I'm glad you said what version you like. It's good to know.
KDE specifically stated that 4.0 should not be used in production,
Yes, I remember that canard. But they created that confusion by calling it v4.0 and making a big splash, hyping up what they had accomplished too much. All those distros didn't start up their KDE4 support on a lark - they were all fooled. Meanwhile people do development releases all the time without getting burned. It's not rocket science.
It's what happens when ego is at the wheel. Remember Reiser? That guy would argue his filesystem was production-ready till he was blue in the face. Meanwhile check his bugtracker and you can see out the other side of his mouth when you report that his his consistency checker is dumping core, he'll tell you "yes that's not finished yet" Oops.
If you think KDE playing the same games isn't as serious, you'd be right, although I'd also suspect you weren't watching the open issues for KMail. Or maybe you just don't mind losing email.
People need to get over their egos and just be honest about what they're releasing. Warning labels, conventional use of version numbering - no green stop signs - or what should they expect? And what's the harm in underpromising and overdelivering? Why is that so hard?
That said, I'm glad it seems to be finally coming under control. The world needs a real alternative to de Icaza's brainchild.
Hah. Calling it v4.0 and then in fine-print "a developer's release" is like making a green stop sign or cherry flavored poison. It was stupid, and not admitting it or learning from it is even "stupider." LOL.
They just wanted to have a release before it was ready and pretend it was. And they mashed their reputation into the dirt as a result.
The thing that really burns is that the world needs an alternative to Novell and Gnome. And KDE should be spanking them.
Well, everyone makes up their own mind. I'm against Mono. The problems with it are not "MS hate." They're a very practical response to Microsoft. If you follow the news (SCO, etc) it's unremarkable fact that they're trying to destroy Linux via intellectual property law. Tricks just like Mono fit right in line.
Microsoft and de Icaza have been trying for ages to tie Mono to Gnome's success, and in a small way, at least, they are succeeding. Canonical considers Mono to be a "core framework" in ubuntu and they include it by default. It's not just Tomboy but F-Spot and other applications now too - Canonical says over 40 at this point.
I don't promise it will blow up as badly as it could, but taking the risk just to have de Icaza's clone of MS's knock off of Java, when Java itself is GPLv3, is... to use Rush Limbaugh's phrase, Developmentally Challenged.
You're right, of course. Everyone gets to talk, that's the bottom line. Funny after thousands of years we're still arguing over it.
I still say free software is the best way. There are lots of free projects miles better than their nearest commercial equivalents. Not always, but often.
If you're a business, and you get told to STFU when complain or ask for help for free, you can then buy that help with real American monopoly dollars. And instead of being stuck buying it from whoever made your software, you can buy it on an open market. Net result, better, cheaper support.
Hence Redhat, IBM, etc. and the enormous success of the free software support business model even in corporate America.
With a commercial project, if you complain, or ask for help, they may help. They can also laugh at you and hang up (metaphorically speaking), even if you just paid them a lot of money. Because they can. Because there's no market and no choice.
I specifically made that point about arguments over blame because I was aware of this issue. I know that KDE blamed Canonical for having "bad" KDE4 releases. And they may well indeed not be good at doing a KDE distro. When I try again it will not be with Kubuntu, this much is certain.
What makes this argument confusing, though, is that it started around 4.0 and 4.1, back when it was not possible to have good KDE releases. In the end, it's tough to make yourself care who blames who.
First of all I really appreciate you sharing your perspective on this.
Who can be objective about these things? I loved KDE3, really did. I've really enjoyed may different fundamental UI frameworks, from Amiga's Workbench to nextstep to early gnome and xfce... Everyone's particular about different things. Who knows.
Obviously KDE4 was unstable for ages, but beyond that there seemed to be things that hinted at a bad underlying direction, too. Take the plasmid that showed folder contents on the desktop. Context menu items, keyboard shortcuts, and drop behaviors were broken and/or different from what konq or dolphin did. You know, I actually liked that they contained the "desktop" folder in a plasmid and let you control that. Great concept. But someone clearly was implementing file management a second time rather than generalizing what KDE already had. And that's just the first basic bit of functionality on the desktop that most everyone sees by default.
It's just one example. It was not only a bad user experience (when the DEL key deletes selected files, except on the desktop), but it betrayed a kind of architectural ineptitude.
BTW, I assuming they must have fixed that DEL key on the desktop at some point. But did they do it by laboriously getting the plasmid to copy the existing file browser code?
The problem is here is not mean, honest people on the internet - who are never going away by the way, even if I felt too bored to comment - the problem is ego. The giant ego on some people who want to claim their opus is finished when it's not, and they know it, but they just want to pretend.
And they know perfectly well it's not - the bug database tells them so. But they label it "finished" "v10" "stable" anyway. And that's just kind of shameful when you're KDE. It's even worse when people do it on filesystems, databases, mailservers, router firmwares, kernels, etc.
Your no-meanies-giving-criticism world would be a dangerous one. Be thankful you live in the real one instead.
Oh I was hardly vague or speaking out of turn - that's now proven.
I have open patches on bugs KDE4, one for many months, and part of my frustration is watching how badly issues are treated on that project - even when they have a clean fix all prepared and ready to apply, at the end of an impeccably documented bug. But you know, that wasn't even worth mentioning, because your underlying point was so stupid.
This is the kind of informative post I was hoping to get. It seems like it's time to look again.
I hope I made clear exactly how and why the KDE team ruined their own brand. No one else is responsible.
I hope I also made it clear how glad I will be to see them find their feet again and if this is the release I can finally use, then I only have one last observation:
Maybe they should call it KDE5 or something else that would draw attention to a newly working release (as opposed to the "KDE4" splash that drew attention to an unusable mess).:)
Slashdot Mirror
I have no idea if I'm an outlier, but with a blind preference for intellectual depth, rigor, and creativity, I tend to see what I figured was normal: more experienced candidates often come out ahead. Not always, but often. More experience unsurpisingly equals more age. The best are often bringing decades of experience, MA or PhD level credentials, and the ineffable things that come from having been there and done that in a lot of different trenches. They often cost more (though not all that much more), and they're worth it.
I know the corporate world at large has this patrician idea about pay related to seniority - whereas I come from the pay-for-value mindset. There is a good observation in the article about older folks making more and therefore being victims of cost cutting. I'm sure this happens as well, but in my world the observation is meaningless. A senior software engineer will get a good salary - more than enough to support an upper middle-class lifestyle (albeit not at the level of an attorney or an anesthesiologist), regardless of their age. If they ask for too much, they will be unemployed; if they tire of unemployment, they bring their compensation demands back in line with their value. I find most people have a very good grasp of the labor market, especially with the advent of widely available salary suvery data.
I have a couple of friends in their 50's who joke about becoming obsolete. I associate this with actually getting tired of keeping up with an industry that reinvintents itself so often, and therefore, not keeping up. There's a trap there, too: a kind of local maxima where, for a while, being an expert in Cobol or IBM mainframes is not only easier than learning Java, but will pay more and more, as you become more and more rare. Until one day you look for your next job and it just... isn't there.
Historically IT has suffered from a lack of technical depth at the top. Companies wanted wise old hands with management experience in charge, even if those wise old hands needed an assistant to print their emails every day (true story, multiple companies). As the next generation rises through the ranks, you will have more middle management, SVP, and ultimately COO, CEO, etc types that have real first-hand knowledge of technology. Eventually the corporate world will lose some of its notortious and costly blindness towards talent, and both hiring and strategy will become more objective and less bullshit-driven.
From here: http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/HTML5-controversy-centres-on-Adobe-Update-931069.html
Update - Ian Hickson has withdrawn his claims. In a posting to the W3C mailing list he said "I was under the impression (based on [1] and some posts to secret mailing lists) that Larry had filed a formal objection on the 2D Context part of what people outside this working group call HTML5. However, I see Larry has now posted publicly that this is not the case".
My guess, this troublemaking was real, but they are backpedalling now.
Adobe is playing the last cards in their slimy little hand to sabotage HTML5.
Standards bodies either survive attempts by wealthy corporate troublemakers to stop the open standards process, or they become irrelevant.
I can't wait to see Flash finally end. It's been a buggy, annoying tool to work with since it came on the scene. Even so, their reign should have been as endless as Windows - all it would have taken was the slightest bit of good stewardship. Too bad they couldn't even be bothered to keep up with 5-10 year old changes in hardware and operating systems.
It's fitting that Macromedia/Adobe's laziness and arrogance will destroy their grip on the web.
LMAO. No counterarguments I see. Thank you for both conceding and showing what an utter douchebag you are.
LOL. You are better with insults than facts, that's for sure.
You don't know what hardware I run. That's 1.
I ran Debian for years. There's a reason everyone uses Canonical. That's 2.
Interestingly while checking googling I did spot something interesting that I hadn't seen before, that you could have suggested but didn't:
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Kde3/Karmic
Sentiment on this latest KDE4 was positive in the crowd. But if it's still crap, this might be the next step.
Who said that? Someone on the bus?
I know that the KDE team is well loved here. But can you please explain to me the strange desire to rewrite history regarding this release?
Look, if you're one of those people who can read what the KDE team said at the time and tell me KDE4 was promoted as a developer-only release, or that they did a good job warning people about its problems, that's fine, but I think our conversation is at an end.
The fact is, they let their ego take the wheel, and not only did they fool individuals, but they had a bunch of mainstream distros like Fedora's and Canonical's push KDE4 downstream. By the way, another big reason for this: KDE's decision to no longer support KDE3.
And then they got an opportunity to learn why you shouldn't try to trick people about the state of your project.
It's not clear anyone took that opportunity, but they got it. It's still there for the taking.
If you are such an expert perhaps you'd like to show the developers how its done
And this is exactly my point - so I will make it again.
Can no one say whether music is bad but a good musician?
Can no one talk about football, unless they can walk on the NFL field?
Can no one say, "hey this release is a steaming pile of shit" unless they can write a better one?
I should hope not - what a dangerous, ugly, self-deluded world some people seem to want. But I guess to those people it may be preferable than a threat to the ego. Cest la vie.
Would you make that comment to Linus Torvlads's criticism of KDE4, just because he hasn't written a desktop GUI?
OK - I'll grant you that one illusion.
Nothing illusory about it.
Mail clients alone... ego has eaten more mail than the postal service will deliver today.
Lost job opportunities, missed connections with old friends, that email back from that girl you met at the party last week... poof. All because ego was at the wheel, and someone wanted to call their email client release "stable" when it had confirmed, open critical data loss bugs. And if you think that is hypothetical, the evidence of having done this exact thing in the past is in the bug trackers for both evolution or kmail (just for a start).
If you're prepared to do that archaeology, you can even read the outraged victims words as they appeared. You can read as the developers said "you get what you pay for dude." And the victims said "fine but would it kill you to put a tiny warning label on your little emailovore so that the next poor victims will know better than to use your free software?"
And with this, they are met with silence, because there is no argument against properly warning people against using your own code... except that you can't admit to yourself or the world what state your project is in.
People? I suspect you are the "people"
I thought the Torvlads quote would help show the depth of the backlash against KDE, and therefore address this particular kind of childish response, and actually, until you posted, it did.
As I said elsewhere, I believe the KDE team knows what their mistakes have done to the size of their user base.
The point here is if the KDE team had simply said, instead of
"On 11th January 2008, the KDE Community released the fourth major version of the K Desktop Environment. This release marks the beginning of the KDE 4 era..."
but rather:
"Today's developer release is out. This is bleeding edge; we're still a year or two away from something usable, but this is stabilized to the point where we'd like more developers and power users to come give it a try with their 2nd machines." - which by
I held out with Kubuntu 8.04 (one of the most polished distro releases I've ever seen) for a very long time. But eventually there wasn't a choice, for me at least. Modern equipment doesn't work with old distros and their aging kernels. And I, like most, have to pick my battles. Going against the grain to try to use KDE3 with something more recent wasn't going to be one of them.
Yes, software patents are broken. Yes, Linux has lots of patent vulnerabilities. Beyond that, I can't really understand your point.
Legal issues are all about perception, and in this case, "Linux Hackers" and distros cloning a Microsoft technology with well-publicized patents creates an entirely different perception in the wild-west of the patent-law courtroom than a troll like SCO popping up and trying shake down IBM.
This is the entire point of Microsoft paying de Icaza for his work on Mono and Gnome. Novell's crooked patent deal with Microsoft ties in to the same strategy.
It's quite simple really. By the way, a lot of the supposed credulity about these issues on slashdot is a paid service. :)
Now, regarding "Miguel never tried to embrace GNOME with Mono. You can't show me any mail/blog post regarding with that." This sounds so obviously and totally untrue that I think this must just be a misunderstanding.
"We hope that the tools that we will provide will be adopted by free software programmers including the GNOME Foundation members and the GNOME project generally."
You tap danced your way around not linking directly to much of anything.
I counter with archive.org records indicating exactly what the KDE said about their project as it was released.
You are either a liar or a fool. Or both.
Try harder next time.
Canonical's Kubuntu pushed the dist upgrade through their (extremely user friendly) UI; that took you from 3 to 4 "way too early." I guess you're saying Canonical was the exception. How many distros made it easy to have "side-by-side" 3-4 setups? Or didn't go to KDE4 until say 4.3?
I would have thought, with what most KDE distros did (push to 4 "early") as well as the high-profile folks whose comments I merely echo, that it would be too plain crazy to claim the KDE made a v4.0 developer release covered in warning labels.. But apparently I would be wrong.
It's only on account of my incredulity about the flexibility of history that I didn't simply pull up archive.org to begin with.
I did a quick CTRL-F for "DO NOT RUN THIS UNLESS YOU'RE PREPARED TO LOSE ALL YOUR DATA." LOL. But in seriousness, can you point out where on this page there is a single hint that there is any "developer-only" aspect to this release?
You know what I see on there?
"KDE 4.0 is the innovative Free Software desktop containing lots of applications for every day use as well as for specific purposes."
You know, and I know, they sold this for all the world as if it were the fully baked successor to KDE3. They did it from day one. They let their ego take the wheel. And then later, when it blew up in their face, they started backtracking. But the damage was done. Had they simply been more humble, and honest, I would have been all -1 Troll from the beginning, and I would have no links, no quotes. Instead. I spent most of this article's life with high scores, and I got about 75% "I agree" comments, regardless of the fact that late moderation has laid waste to my karma - after years here, a first, and an interesting experience.
But it looks like we still haven't all gotten the message. I don't mind getting shot - that's one of the risks of being the messenger. But I hate to see good projects keep getting hurt by this kind of thinking.
Thank you - very interesting and good to know!
I wonder why the folks involved didn't unify the code up front rather than have redundant code and then refactor? Why waste so much effort doing it the wrong way first?
I know what you mean. I was able to work around it via NFS. Not a solution for all cases, I'm afraid.
And I hear you. I would have stayed with K8.04 but needed newer kernels/drivers for newer hardware. :(
It's an interesting point. Mainline has begun to work more like that; there doesn't seem to be any 2.7 on the horizon.
That said, no one uses mainline anymore either. Almost all Linux users use a distro fork. You could argue mainline is the development tree.
No, that wouldn't have worked, that would have implied it was a continuation of the 3x series.
I fail to see how... if they said it wasn't.
See how your logic breaks down? You might have argued that version numbers are meaningless and don't imply anything - that would also have been wrong, but at least it would have been consistent.
There was NO confusion over who their audience was.
So obviously there was - as you make clear, the version number implied something. In this case, what it implied threw off many users, including Torvalds. It wasn't their only problem - they did not make their warnings as clear as they wish they did in retrospect, I'm sure.
And what about all the distros, by the way - why did they package it and send it downstream to KDE3 users when it wasn't done? Should all these people "end it?"
in the old days, there was no such thing as alpha, beta, and rc1, rc2, whatever. It was "here's branch # such and such"
I'm aware that they explain their (wrong) rationale for numbering in that way. It didn't make anyone any less surprised.
I guess you're saying they did all they can to warn people off. But given the huge mess that this way of thinking made for KDE, I would hope they might be admitting some fault and looking for ways to communicate better. It's not like they were doing anything wrong by having a development release. Teams do it all the time without much of an issue. Communicating this is not rocket science.
But you see the problem is ego. Some folks didn't want to shout out that it was alpha or beta. They didn't want to call it v3.9 or "v4.0 PRERELEASE" or give it a milestone or alternate name, or any of the many things you see every day. And for the same reason, some folks don't want to hear or accept what damage they did to KDE's reputation. I have a guess - that somewhere within the KDE organization, there are stats on how their userbase shrank, perhaps from one or another of their various web services, and they tell the moral of this sad story. But I guess once you start with the denial, you can come up with an explanation for anything, and blame anyone.
So calling it v3.9Alpha would have been asking too much?
What was it, do you think, that made them reject this alternate version number, and go with v4.0 instead?
Surely not a respect for common practices of version numbering.
They made a green stop sign. The disclaimers, IIRC, were not so prominent until after they had already sunk their own reputation with the (totally avoidable) confusion over who their audience was for that release.
You'd be wrong. And I think I made my point pretty well about why you shouldn't feel so bad not to live in a world where positive opinions are the only ones allowed.
I'm glad you said what version you like. It's good to know.
KDE specifically stated that 4.0 should not be used in production,
Yes, I remember that canard. But they created that confusion by calling it v4.0 and making a big splash, hyping up what they had accomplished too much. All those distros didn't start up their KDE4 support on a lark - they were all fooled. Meanwhile people do development releases all the time without getting burned. It's not rocket science.
It's what happens when ego is at the wheel. Remember Reiser? That guy would argue his filesystem was production-ready till he was blue in the face. Meanwhile check his bugtracker and you can see out the other side of his mouth when you report that his his consistency checker is dumping core, he'll tell you "yes that's not finished yet" Oops.
If you think KDE playing the same games isn't as serious, you'd be right, although I'd also suspect you weren't watching the open issues for KMail. Or maybe you just don't mind losing email.
People need to get over their egos and just be honest about what they're releasing. Warning labels, conventional use of version numbering - no green stop signs - or what should they expect? And what's the harm in underpromising and overdelivering? Why is that so hard?
That said, I'm glad it seems to be finally coming under control. The world needs a real alternative to de Icaza's brainchild.
Hah. Calling it v4.0 and then in fine-print "a developer's release" is like making a green stop sign or cherry flavored poison. It was stupid, and not admitting it or learning from it is even "stupider." LOL.
They just wanted to have a release before it was ready and pretend it was. And they mashed their reputation into the dirt as a result.
The thing that really burns is that the world needs an alternative to Novell and Gnome. And KDE should be spanking them.
Well, everyone makes up their own mind. I'm against Mono. The problems with it are not "MS hate." They're a very practical response to Microsoft. If you follow the news (SCO, etc) it's unremarkable fact that they're trying to destroy Linux via intellectual property law. Tricks just like Mono fit right in line.
Microsoft and de Icaza have been trying for ages to tie Mono to Gnome's success, and in a small way, at least, they are succeeding. Canonical considers Mono to be a "core framework" in ubuntu and they include it by default. It's not just Tomboy but F-Spot and other applications now too - Canonical says over 40 at this point.
I don't promise it will blow up as badly as it could, but taking the risk just to have de Icaza's clone of MS's knock off of Java, when Java itself is GPLv3, is... to use Rush Limbaugh's phrase, Developmentally Challenged.
You're right, of course. Everyone gets to talk, that's the bottom line. Funny after thousands of years we're still arguing over it.
I still say free software is the best way. There are lots of free projects miles better than their nearest commercial equivalents. Not always, but often.
If you're a business, and you get told to STFU when complain or ask for help for free, you can then buy that help with real American monopoly dollars. And instead of being stuck buying it from whoever made your software, you can buy it on an open market. Net result, better, cheaper support.
Hence Redhat, IBM, etc. and the enormous success of the free software support business model even in corporate America.
With a commercial project, if you complain, or ask for help, they may help. They can also laugh at you and hang up (metaphorically speaking), even if you just paid them a lot of money. Because they can. Because there's no market and no choice.
I specifically made that point about arguments over blame because I was aware of this issue. I know that KDE blamed Canonical for having "bad" KDE4 releases. And they may well indeed not be good at doing a KDE distro. When I try again it will not be with Kubuntu, this much is certain.
What makes this argument confusing, though, is that it started around 4.0 and 4.1, back when it was not possible to have good KDE releases. In the end, it's tough to make yourself care who blames who.
First of all I really appreciate you sharing your perspective on this.
Who can be objective about these things? I loved KDE3, really did. I've really enjoyed may different fundamental UI frameworks, from Amiga's Workbench to nextstep to early gnome and xfce... Everyone's particular about different things. Who knows.
Obviously KDE4 was unstable for ages, but beyond that there seemed to be things that hinted at a bad underlying direction, too. Take the plasmid that showed folder contents on the desktop. Context menu items, keyboard shortcuts, and drop behaviors were broken and/or different from what konq or dolphin did. You know, I actually liked that they contained the "desktop" folder in a plasmid and let you control that. Great concept. But someone clearly was implementing file management a second time rather than generalizing what KDE already had. And that's just the first basic bit of functionality on the desktop that most everyone sees by default.
It's just one example. It was not only a bad user experience (when the DEL key deletes selected files, except on the desktop), but it betrayed a kind of architectural ineptitude.
BTW, I assuming they must have fixed that DEL key on the desktop at some point. But did they do it by laboriously getting the plasmid to copy the existing file browser code?
The problem is here is not mean, honest people on the internet - who are never going away by the way, even if I felt too bored to comment - the problem is ego. The giant ego on some people who want to claim their opus is finished when it's not, and they know it, but they just want to pretend.
And they know perfectly well it's not - the bug database tells them so. But they label it "finished" "v10" "stable" anyway. And that's just kind of shameful when you're KDE. It's even worse when people do it on filesystems, databases, mailservers, router firmwares, kernels, etc.
Your no-meanies-giving-criticism world would be a dangerous one. Be thankful you live in the real one instead.
LOL. Any other last words?
Oh I was hardly vague or speaking out of turn - that's now proven.
I have open patches on bugs KDE4, one for many months, and part of my frustration is watching how badly issues are treated on that project - even when they have a clean fix all prepared and ready to apply, at the end of an impeccably documented bug. But you know, that wasn't even worth mentioning, because your underlying point was so stupid.
This is the kind of informative post I was hoping to get. It seems like it's time to look again.
I hope I made clear exactly how and why the KDE team ruined their own brand. No one else is responsible.
I hope I also made it clear how glad I will be to see them find their feet again and if this is the release I can finally use, then I only have one last observation:
Maybe they should call it KDE5 or something else that would draw attention to a newly working release (as opposed to the "KDE4" splash that drew attention to an unusable mess). :)