.comment: Weaseling a Good Idea

By: Dennis E. Powell
Wednesday, November 15, 2000 03:34:37 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/opinions/2645/1/

A Non-Denial Denial

Today's announcement of the KDE League is a good thing. It would be even better if the KDE people hadn't lied about it months ago.

If you remember, at the Linux convention in California in August something called the Gnome Foundation was announced and was met with a great deal of discussion. KDE partisans were outraged.

There appeared, a few weeks later, a story on ZDNet saying that the leading lights of KDE were joining with captains of industry to form the KDE League, whose purpose, like that of the Gnome Foundation, was (perhaps best) left to the imagination. This, too, raised eyebrows.

Fortunately, the rumors were quickly put to rest when KDE developer Kurt Granroth sent an email to one or two of the KDE mailing lists: "We have stated in the past that KDE will *never* have an elected governing board like GNOME Foundation. Absolutely nothing has happened or will happen to change that."

Most people took this to mean that the talk of something called the KDE League was just an unfounded rumor. A few noted that it was "a non-denial denial," meaning that it was weasel-worded in such a way as to be misleading while technically true. Few believed this explanation, though. KDE is, after all, not president of the United States.

In fact, it was weasel words. Work was underway on the KDE League. The earthshaking announcement--we await to hear from the seismic center in Boulder, Colorado, just how earthshaking--was to be saved for Comdex, even if it meant deliberately misleading the existing user base in the interim. So much for the open community.

Yes, I'm sure they had what they thought was a really good reason. No one who isn't up for elective office lies for no reason.

I hope they decide it wasn't worth it.

So What Is the KDE League?

What was this blockbuster secret? KDE's developers, along with a number of commercial companies, are joining to promote KDE. That's pretty much it. This afternoon at Comdex they will have a news conference, where they will hand out press kits. This morning they issued a news release, oddly timed.

The companies involved include some big names, some of whom are also heavily involved in the Gnome Foundation. The companies include IBM, Inprise/Borland, Corel, Compaq, Caldera, SuSE, Mandrake, TurboLinux, Hewlett-Packard, TrollTech, Fujitsu-Siemens, VALinux, theKompany.com, KDE.com, and others. The League's first board meeting was held at Harrah's in Las Vegas Monday afternoon.

To be an "Executive member" of the KDE League, one must pony up a $5,000 initiation fee and $10,000 dues per year; to be an "Affiliate member," the price tag is $1,000 ante, $2,000 to play, per annum. There is an additional class of member, but there is just one of these: the KDE development community itself as represented by from three to six board members, depending among other things upon how many are necessary for KDE to maintain a balance of control.

The League's purposes, according to its bylaws, are manifold:

• Sustain, provide and facilitate formal and informal educate [sic] about the features, capabilities and other qualities of KDE;
• Encourage corporations, governments, enterprises and individuals to use KDE;
• Encourage corporations, governments, enterprises and individuals to develop for KDE;
• Sustain, provide and facilitate formal and informal education about development for KDE;
• Provide expertise, information, direction and position papers regarding KDE and its development and use;
• Foster communication and cooperation between and among KDE developers;
• Foster communication and cooperation between KDE developers and the public through publications, articles, web sites, meetings, attendance at trade shows, press releases, interviews, promotional materials and committees.

The organization of the KDE League is not a huge departure from a standard boilerplate corporation: there will be an annual meeting, a board of directors, and an executive committee of board members who will handle the League's day-to-day functioning.

What the KDE League Won't Do

The organizers have taken what appears to be considerable pains to eliminate any suggestion that it will attempt to exercise--or even possess--any control over the direction or nature of KDE development. Instead, the idea seems to be to provide financial and promotional considerations for mutual benefit. This means that companies who wish to develop commercial applications for KDE are welcome, and indeed some of these, such as a KDE interface for IBM's ViaVoice speech-recognition software, are expected to be announced at this afternoon's Comdex news conference.

The fact that many of the backers of the Gnome Foundation are also involved in the KDE League suggests that after their two decades with a Microsoft monopoly they do not wish to be stuck with a single desktop now that they see Linux as the key to the iron-clad-locked chains of Redmond. And it couldn't come at a better time.

As anybody with brains more than those of a potted plant can see, Linux is fast approaching its breakthrough moment. It has reached critical mass, with the flawed but exciting XFree86-4.x, the upcoming 2.4 kernel, with KDE2 and upcoming versions of Gnome. As a desktop operating system it will, with these new things, be unsurpassed, except in the minds of the sort of people who think Netscape 6 is an upgrade--but I've already eliminated the potted plants, haven't I?

The next round of Linux distributions will be unbelievably exciting, even for the newbie. They will include all these exciting improvements and will make them easy to install and configure. Not to disparage Gnome or its foundation, but the decision by Sun to put that desktop atop Solaris isn't really the final word. Still, absent any buzz-producing body, KDE could be forgotten through neglect, though many leading distributions would include it as the default desktop.

KDE has forever needed a drummer to whip up a little excitement about what has always been a really great desktop. Now KDE has that tub thumper.

Which is a good thing. Still, there's cause for a little discomfort.

C'mon--Why Worry?

One of the pleasanter aspects of dealing with KDE folks over the years is that they have all been genuinely nice guys. They really are. When I was starting out and had some weird configuration problem, I'd often get email with suggestions, not on a mailing list, from some heavy-duty KDE folk. And they'd stick with it until the problem was solved. They're still that way.

When leaders of competing desktops belittled KDE, the reaction was usually more hurt than anger. These KDE guys worked hard, did good work, gave it their all, and produced something to be proud of, very proud.

I fear that the KDE League might change that. The news release today announcing the League, it was proposed, should be distributed during a speech by Miguel de Icaza, leader of Gnome and one of the founders of Helixcode. This is not how KDE people have behaved. Nor is that half-assed denial from Kurt in early September. The KDE folks have always been gentle toward competitors and open with users, and the KDE League has already nuked those things.

It's true: as Open Source meets Bigtime Computing, there's bound to be some grating and grinding. It is sad that the first victims are decency and honesty, but perhaps they'll be recovered, as they can and should be.

In a broader sense, we may be seeing a forking, not of code but of community. The potty little dabblers who happen to crank out very good code for the sheer love of the art, and the people who used to be among them, now dazzled by--what? Money, sure, and there's nothing wrong with that; it's to be applauded. We all graduate sometime. The problem is that there is a risk of losing the very attributes that made the good people who write free code so attractive to the big outfits who run the human equivalent of anthills. I mean, have you ever been to IBM? Pretty impressive, pretty anonymous.

But the big guys have realized that their way of doing things doesn't work anymore. They look now toward the way that Linux has succeeded where they have failed. They want to be like us . We should not jump to be like them.

Nor need we. Yes, it's important for developers to pay attention when interest is shown by companies. And it's a good thing when those companies come forward in a spirit of cooperation. They are interested in learning how this phenomenon of Linux came to be what it is. And they have things to offer; Corel's participation made KDE2 better. There's other advice to which we should listen. We should in return be eager to show them a better way of developing software. (IBM used to have, maybe still does, a selection available of employee-written software--yes, it's reasonable to assume that all of IBM's software was written by employees, but this was different: nifty little applications written by IBM employees who just loved writing programs. The company knew that there was something to it, but it took Linux to tell them what that something was and is.)

The KDE League (and for that matter, the Gnome Foundation) is a manifestation of the interest in Linux shown by the computing establishment, which has offered money and people to aid worthwhile projects. We must not forget that they aren't here to change us; they're here to make it easier for the Linux community to do what it has always done.