On Wednesday 02 October 2002 8:21 am, Reynald I. Ngo wrote: > Please refrain from distro bashing. We're all on the same boat > for OSS... each and every distro contributes to the community.
I'm not distro bashing, just pointing out there are alternatives especially when Linux distro like Bad Hat have been behaving quite badly and limits our "freedom to choose whatever desktop we like with full functionality intact". Thanks to Bad Hat developer Bero for the guts to stand by his ideals and the ideals of freedom at the cost of losing his job. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- List: kde-devel Subject: New address From: Bernhard Rosenkraenzer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: 2002-09-25 7:36:31 [Download message RAW] Hi, Effective immediately, I've left Red Hat (mostly in mutual agreement - I don't want to work on crippling KDE, and they don't want an employee who admits RH 8.0's KDE is crippleware). If anyone needs/wants to contact me, please use the addresses [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED] For any RH specific KDE issues, please contact Than Ngo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. LLaP bero --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yes, Bad Hat contributes to the community. But must they cripple KDE to get "a unified desktop", or "a uniform look and feel"? Bad Hat's long-standing animosity to KDE developers is really unhealthy. If they are for choice, then they should allow the other desktops to flourish, like Window Maker, Fluxbox, IceWm, and not give preference only to Gnome and break the functionality of other desktops, particularly KDE. Users should be allowed to run their desktop of choice in Bad Hat, with full functionality intact. I don't want Bad Hat interfering with my freedom of choice. Bad Hat's mutilation is not just about unified themes (See below -- www.mosfet.org), but goes deep to KDE's libraries and programs as well. Is this a positive contribution to the open source community when you mangle their work? Bad Hat is not yet LSB certified, and this complicates things even more. If Bad Hat really cares about the community, they should work towards better interoperability for all programs and strive for LSB certification. Bad Hat can unify the desktops without breaking functionality! KDE will let you choose what program to open what file, even if that program is a Gnome app (Me, I open jpegs, pngs with Gqview instead of KView because Gqview's dithering algorithms are superior than KView's). Bad Hat can install default themes that makes both environments look the same. Bad Hat can reorganize the Control Center of Gnome and KDE to look the same. Bad Hat can make files open with preferred programs of their liking without crippling libraries. I hope Bad Hat doesn't get away with this circus act. I know that admins here who use Window Maker, IceWm, or Fluxbox in their servers and desktops will also be up in arms should Bad Hat decide to castrate functionality from their desktop of choice. By the way, I also hate it when anyone (let's take Jijo as an example) cannot download ISOs from Bad Hat and sell it as Red Hat 8.0. Bad Hat forbids Jijo from doing it that way. Jijo can sell other Debian, Slackware, or whatever GPL distro that he likes without running into silly "name games". We can vote with our wallets and support distros who promote our freedom of choice. For me, Lindows and Bad Hat are two distros I wouldn't care about. -- mikol "There is no concept more closer to intellectual emancipation than free software. Freedom to responsibly code and share in its most free and pure form." -- Floyd Robinson, September 24, 2002 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- www.mosfet.org As most of you know, I finally took mosfet.org offline some time ago and have not been involved in Linux since. Many of you know I've been getting frustrated with Linux for some time, and RedHat breaking KDE has been the last straw. I'm tired of companies like RedHat crapping on free software development projects, and KDE is not the only group that has complained about their cavalier attitude toward people contributing to free software and glaring mistakes made in their distribution. This incomplete lists includes several people from Wine, GCC, MPlayer, and even Gnome. Some RH or Gnome advocates have tried to justify RedHat's actions by either saying, "Hey, they just added a new theme to KDE to make the desktops look similar - nothing wrong with that!", or by saying, "It's free software and RH can do whatever they like despite what the developers think". Both points are wrong. RH's crippling KDE isn't just about themes. As for the first point, that RedHat has just developed a new theme to make KDE look like Gnome, this is patently false. Many distributions have made custom KDE themes in order to make their product unique. While of course this is a bad idea since it would be preferable to have KDE look the same by default across all Linux distributions, nobody really gets upset about it. Of course this behavior makes it difficult for people to do things like Linux books because everyone is shipping with different themes, but whatever. When distributions do it right it actually works out well for both sides: Conectiva redid all the KDE icons and they looked really nice so now are the default for KDE3.1. Of course, unlike RH, Conectiva worked with KDE developers from the very beginning in a very open way. But themes aren't really the issue. The issue is they also made several changes to the KDE libraries and programs, some of which cause breakage, incompatibilities, or reduce functionality. In some cases changing code wasn't even needed but RH didn't know better because all the people working on their customized fork never coded KDE before. Even their project manager admits they don't know KDE very well. It is my opinion that when your forking a project you should know something about the program your forking first... The only person they had working on KDE and had any experience with it's codebase was Bero, who was forced to make KDE packages in his spare time because RH refused to put any resources in KDE. He has now quit RH because of their crippling of KDE and screwing up the codebase. Take a look at RedHat's source RPMs if you want to see all the modifications they made with absolutely no experience or peer review. The other problem is switching the default applications for things like the web browser and email client from their KDE implementations to Gnome apps while using the KDE desktop. Initially I didn't even think they included the KDE versions but I found this is not the case. Of course it is okay to integrate Gnome apps into KDE and vice-versa, but by making non-native applications default within the KDE environment they are crippling KDE. It will take longer to load the default web browser or email client in KDE than it would in Gnome, it will consume more memory, and it will not provide a consistent look and feel with file dialogs, etc... all when KDE has it's own native equivalents. The argument for this that "we only want to support one version of these applications". Okay, but then why are you shipping KDE if you only want to support GTK/Gnome applications? It would be better not to ship it at all, or ship it as unsupported, which is basically what RH has done all through KDE's existence. What I think would make both parties happy is for RH to integrate apps across the desktops, but allow each desktops to use their native applications as their defaults. In this manner you'd still have the KDE web browser as the default browser under KDE, but users would also be able to access Mozilla easily through the menus. Let's face it: Gnome people would have an absolute fit if some distribution replaced Mozilla and Evolution with Konqueror and KMail in their Gnome desktop, but people seem to think it's okay to do the same thing to KDE. RH would still have to support people using the KDE desktop actually using KDE applications, which they don't seem to want to do, but if they don't want this they shouldn't be including KDE as a supported setup! It's not like the GTK/Gnome apps are significantly better - I tried the latest Mozilla and the latest Konqueror and Konqueror both renders and runs far faster under KDE than Mozilla does under icewm, and I haven't found a site it can't handle. The Konqueror in KDE3.1 is way fast :) It's RH's right to do this to KDE! As for the second point, that KDE is free software and RH can do whatever it wants to it, this is also a very unhealthy attitude for people to take. Remember that most free software is done by volunteers in their spare time. If commercial Linux companies start disrespecting the goals of these volunteers too often people leave the community. Unlike what people like Dennis Powell may think, Linux distributions are not just normal Linux users who can do whatever they want. They are depended upon by both free software developers and their users to deliver free software reasonably intact. RH has broke this trust many times, with a GCC that couldn't even compile the kernel or many other Linux apps, and now with KDE. This disrespect of various projects has caused many problems with RH. People feel like, "why work on free software if RH is just going to screw it up"? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _ Philippine Linux Users Group. 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