Reorganizing the KDE organization (Re: Redefining kdelibs and kdebase)

[Tobias Koenig]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2005 at 12:36:21AM -0400, Cristian Tibirna wrote:
Hi,

> And why doesn't it happen now (and will never happen, IMHO, save special -- 
> specified ahead -- conditions are met) ?
> 
> Because imposing strict responsabilities and defined workload requires 
> compensation. Yes, a mundane salary. Unfortunately, I don't see near 
> prospects for enlightened companies or renaissance millionaires to agree of 
> subsidising the necessary very dedicated KDE developers so that kdelibs 
> technologies gain assigned maintainers doing what you (and common sense) say 
> they have to do.
IMHO the problem is not to find somebody who is willing to maintain a
piece of kdelibs but somebody who is able to do.

Many parts are quite complex (kxmlgui, kio, kdirlister&co) so that often
only the authors of that code know the whole functionality and are able
to fix bug the correct way.

The problem is, that these people got jobs at companies where they don't
have the time to work on KDE as they wanted, so the maintenance quality
decreases.

A possible solution could be to document the code (not only the API) and
create concept papers, so for 'outsiders' it's easier to get into the
code.

> I came lately to realize though that not a code reorganisation is essential 
> but a reorganisation of the project (community, resources, policies and 
> statement of goals). Our community/project is still organised quite similarly 
> to what we had while still pursuing Mathias's initial dream (c.a. 1996). That 
> dream was fulfilled with KDE-2 IMHO. We are now far beyond that initial 
> dream. 
I can't see a problem here either. We are now around 1000 (even more)
developers worldwide and as far as I know there doesn't exists any
problems or conflicts between developers which couldn't be solved by
a friendly discussion.

Over the years (and with the fledgeling of the sub projects) the
organization changed from a central one (everybody works on
kdelibs/kdecore) to a distributed one (kdemultimedia, kdeedu, kdepim)
where every subproject has it's one maintainer or at least a person whos
decisions count most.

This model scales quite well and is a nice example of how Open Source
development can work.

Ciao,
Tobias
-- 
Separate politics from religion and economy!
The Councile of the European Union is an undemocratic and illegal institution!

	

	
		
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