On Thu, 2004-12-02 at 13:55 +0000, Arturo wrote: > Sorry for the offtopic question. I like Fedora, and I plan to stick to > it, but why does it so often feel that the Fedora devs just simply > forget KDE? What follows is purely opinion formed while observing the development of Linux for many years. It does not necessarily represent the opinion of my employer, RH, SUSE, Linus Torvalds, Lee Iacocca, Vladmir Putin, or any other person, organization, or entity, living, non-living, or yet-to-live, besides myself. My guess would be that it's one part strategic, one part historical. First, the history: RH has generally striven to ship only unencumbered software. When it ships anything else, it's usually because an alternative doesn't exist. If you go back many years, Qt used to be partially encumbered, thereby making KDE less than Free (per. FSF definition). The issue was resolved, but not before Gnome had gained momentum. Now we get to the strategic part. It takes time and money to maintain a polished desktop. RH has invested more into Gnome. SUSE has invested more in KDE. RH has taken alot of abuse over KDE, but in my opinion SUSE has historically done even worse with Gnome. (Hopefully this will change as Novell continues to integrate Novell, Ximian, and SUSE to form a single company.) Both RH and SUSE are commercial entities, they have to prioritise and allocate resources. Gentoo and Debian, both of which are mostly volunteer based, have done a decent job of packaging both desktops, only occasionally demonstrating a partial preference for one or the other. And that's the root of the problem. Companies are best off picking one general direction and sticking to it, volunteers can afford to explore the whole map. Now we come to where you fit in. Because RH is welcoming volunteer support in the development of Fedora, you can help improve the quality of KDE support in Fedora. The more you do by testing, reporting bugs, and submitting patches, the more momentum KDE will have within the Fedora project. Until then, don't be surprised if Gnome enjoys a favored status simply because more people developing and testing Fedora are using it. Some people get upset or make accusations, but resist the temptation. Just keep providing gentle reminders like you did in your message. -- Stuart Jansen <sjansen@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Guru Labs, L.C.
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