Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4570 mails)

["Steven T. Hatton" <hattons@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I believe a lot of people are thinking of the GNOME/KDE situation in terms of 
which DE is easier to use, or more attractive, stable, installable, 
compatable, etc.  If you are thinking in those terms, then you are missing 
the reason I am - and I suspect Mantel is - so upset about the appearant 
decision on the part of Novell to force SuSE to stop funding the KDE.  The 
KDE is a community.  It's a development team scattered all over the world.  
Sometimes the only common language the people working on a component speak 
well is C++.

My contributions to the KDE are rather small, and mostly consist of bug 
reports and a few personality conflict resolutions. But those minor 
contributions represent thousands of hours of reading source code, playing 
with software, building from CVS/SVN, reading existing bug reports to find 
out if what I'm reporting is a known issue, learning C++, etc.  I have never 
met a single KDE developer face-to-face, but I have been corresponding with 
them for years.  I consider them to be my friends.  Taking an axe to that 
community isn't just about messing with an outstanding software project, it's 
about hurting my friends.

Steven