Canonical trying to kill KDE?? - Fwd: Attend CampKDE... via ... (VOIP), BerkeleyTIP - Re: Request to mailing list kubuntu-users rejected

[Kevin Krammer]

On Sunday, 2010-01-17, giovanni_re wrote:
> Thanks for your interest in the well being of the KDE project, Dotan.  :)
> 
> Summary, Dotan:  I sense the presence of some _deep_ cover operatives here,
>  people who are not who they seem to be.  People who, actually, rather than
>  working to straight out _kill_, are working on something more diabolical:
>  working to turn (among many, but certainly in this case) the KDE project
>  into _always_ something just shy of success.  Not exactly the living dead,
>  but, just so tinily more than that that it will _absolutely not _ever__ be
>  competitive with, in the mind of the general public, Microsoft Windows.

While that's not impossible I think it is highly unlikely.
How would a group of individuals or even a single individual gain enough 
influence to do any harm while working against the others' interest?

> See, I can specifically recall Linus Torvalds, in about 1998? 9? 2000?,
>  down at the Linux World conference in San Jose, california, 5000-10000
>  people in the audience, video recorded, big crowd, where he said he
>  thought there would be a competitive GUI desktop in about 2005.  At the
>  time, 5 years away, given the momentum the KDE project had then, seemed
>  excessively far in the future, AFAI conceived the situation.  It seemed it
>  should be 2002, maybe 3 at the latest.
> 
> Here we are in 2010, & KUbuntu is flat out uncompetitive with the Mac or
>  Windows, IMO, for, for example, the general college student population
>  here at U. C. Berkeley, let alone colleges with students of lesser
>  academic potential - due to the hand holding for configuration, etc,
>  required, & lack of competitive application sw functionality.

Kubuntu is just one product shipping with KDE software, there are a lot of 
others, including ones that are not widely known , e.g. custom distributions 
used by governmental institutions, or like on the first generation Acer 
netbooks.

> & me, I'm an _effortful_ encourager of Freedom (GNU) (& BSD, fwiw) sw., to
>  people. ... I encourage, but I can't deny the terrible lack of progress in
>  the _crucial_, _competitive_ areas, against the major commercial
>  offerings, since at least 2005.

Can you give an example of "terrible lack of progress" and such areas?
As far as I can tell there has been tremendous progress in becoming viable for 
larger segments of the population, transitioning from providing the needs for 
technology affine people to providing the needs for the part of the general 
public who do are about certain functionality and not a certain brand.

> Where is the streaming video from CampKDE? Where was the promotion to the
>  community of the streaming video?  Where is the indication they are
>  recording talk videos & making them available the same day?  Where is the
>  live voice global conferencing for CampKDE & promotion to all the major
>  LUGs throughout the world? [Oh, well, I put my effort in on that part. ;)

My guess is that provision of streaming video coverage is just to much effort, 
not just on the technology side (bandwidth, etc), but also on the personnel 
side (basically all these conferences are run by volunteers).

Often conference venues do not have the necessary equipment for even plain 
video/audio recording in large rooms and renting it is not always viable 
either.

> My point: A KDE event in the USA in 2010 should have 1000 people in
>  attendance, period.  All it takes is a person competent in event
>  management.  Boston, NewYork, WashingtonDC, maybe Los Angeles, or Silicon
>  Valley / San Francisco.  Hold CampKDE with SCALE next month in LA in
>  February. 100 people???? That is ridiculous. :( - Well, if it were not for
>  the deep cover people. :(

I am not sure which type of event Camp KDE is supposed to be but if it is like 
Akademy then it is a contributor conference which makes 1000 people extremely 
unlikely, given that the whole contributor community is not a lot bigger than 
that, spread across the planet and generally also bound by external 
obligations such as work and family.

1000 attendees is about the scale of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, which 
was a combined conference for GNOME and KDE (and with participants of third 
party desktop software contributors).

100 attendees is already quite a lot, especially given that this is the 
capacity the venue at hand can accomodate:

"Well, we may not hit 100 North
Americans this time but that's at least partially because the venue can
only hold 100 people."

Cheers,
Kevin
-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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