Bero Quits Red Hat Over Treatment of KDE 615
Vicegrip writes "In an article on leaked release notes on Redhat 8.0 CNet also revealed that Bernhard Rosenkraenzer, known here on Slashdot as berorh, has quit over objections he has on what Redhat is doing to KDE in the new release. Bero says that the new version of KDE in Redhat 8.0 is going to be crippleware.
I know I always found Bero's comments here on Slashdot helpful and insightful. His worries about what Redhat is doing to KDE for 8.0 have me rather concerned and thinking of switching distributions."
Get Mandrake 9.0 (Score:2, Informative)
Anyone who's used it likes it. (Score:5, Informative)
Red Hat have:
Re:"free" software (Score:4, Informative)
Anyone who's used the 8.0 beta can tell you they're enhancing their usability, nmot their brand with their changes. The grab bag of different applications, inconsistent themes, and desktop specific panel apps are there if you want them. But Red Hat have made themes and panel apps consistent by default and put what they consider the best apps forward by outting them on the quick launch area of the taskbar. Its no big deal, and Red Hat 8.0s KDE runs every KDE app I've built and packaged for it.
Re:Sooner or later... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, it's false, and I suspect you might not know it. GNOME was created by the GNU folks as an alternative to KDE at a time when KDE was dependent on a piece of non-free software, specifically the Qt libraries. Though it's now Free, Qt was at the time "shared source," more or less. Once Qt became Free, people kept developing and using GNOME because they were used to it and had come to prefer it.
They did it for the same reason RMS started GNU in the first place: to give people who insist on Free Software a good system to use. RMS didn't start GNU to "kill" SunOS or HP/UX or BSD, but to have the kind of system that his ethics and aesthetics preferred. Yes, BSD was non-free when GNU was started: BSD depended on AT&T proprietary Unix code. That quit being the case in 1994 or so -- but you wouldn't expect all the GNU and Linux developers to suddenly jump ship for BSD, would you? Of course not; as with GNOME and KDE, they had come to prefer their own system and kept developing it because they wished to.
That's called freedom. Not "killing" -- freedom. Learn to recognize it.
Re:Make the switch (Score:4, Informative)
>anymore. They go to the edge...
>
>Postfix over sendmail
Postfix was added to Red Hat in 7.3.
>Postgres over MySQL
Postgres has been in since 5.0, about five years ago. (On a side note, MySQL didn't make it in until 7.0).
>i586 over i386
Red Hat compiles -mcpu=i586 -march=i386, which means optimization for i586, but without using instructions that are incompatible with i386. The performance increase for doing -march=i586 is negligable except in a few corner cases.
However, the kernel and glibc are shipped with optimizations for multiple architectures, so as to provide most of the benefits without locking out non-pentium architectures.
Matt
Re:Sooner or later... (Score:4, Informative)
If you know the truth of proposition P (viz., that the purpose of the creation of GNOME was other than to "kill" KDE) but you assert in debate proposition not-P (that the purpose of creating GNOME was to "kill" KDE) then you engage in a wrongful act of lying. There is no place in intelligent debate for lying. The only purpose lying can serve in discussion is to attempt to lead another astray -- to cause another to think or act on the basis of information you know is wrong. Though lying may serve some useful purposes in certain social occasions (contra Kant) it has no justification in debate and is wholly immoral.
Now, back on topic -- license problems may not be a "real life" issue to you if you are neither a Free Software developer or distributor, nor of the opinion that secret-source, thought-monopoly software is harmful. However, not all the world is in the same boat you are. To a substantial number of people -- among them the GNU and GNOME core developers, self-evidently -- these are issues most assuredly real. They would be remiss in their ethical duties to set aside their own principles simply because a fool might someday mock them as impractical.
Re:Anyone who's used it likes it. (Score:4, Informative)
> release:
But not an informed one. You left a lot out, in addition to putting the RH spin on what you included. RH has also:
- Added lots of buggy Xft stuff to QT
- Buggy changes to support vfolder
- Broke service name compatibility
- Broke plugin handling
The gruesome details are all in bugzilla.
These are off the top of my head, I've probably left some out.
Re:Amen (Score:4, Informative)
RedHat should have given the user a choice at least. If the user installed KDE (not default), then by gosh, they probably wanted to run KDE.
Re:Amen (Score:3, Informative)
If someone really wants KDE, they can get it straight from kde.org -- I get a fair amount of software from the original source. The KDE project can distribute their blessed distribution however they want to do so. If you *really* want vanilla KDE with no GNOME integration done at all, then there are distros like Mandrake that *have* taken this approach...but I like seeing the diversity among distros that characterizes Linux. If someone wants to make a distro that has a totally terminal-based UI through an X server and AAlib and runs Enlightenment...well, they can do so. The users will end up voting by using whichever they prefer -- it could be that Red Hat is doing the wrong thing or the right thing. People will try both, and comment on them. RH will probably polish things up in 8.1, and if people still don't like the approach...well, Mandrake will get them.
Re:Sooner or later... (Score:3, Informative)
-Hope
Re:Crippling KDE??? (Score:3, Informative)
It might be considered premature, but its the direction things are moving in both the GNOME and KDE world. One thing that is rarely pointed out by the khicken littles is that this code hasn't been declared stable for GNOME either.
>changing KDE service types (thus, breaking third
>party kde apps that use kparts/ktrader.)
They only changes the binary names. The whole point of ktrader is that you don't *need* to hard code names or paths.
Matt
Re:quit whineing (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe because there are third-party apps that use KDE libraries, just like there are third-party apps that use GNOME libraries. I just wish more people would realize that wanting to have GNOME and/or KDE installed is not always necessarily the same as wanting to have the look-and-feel of GNOME/KDE.
Re:Anyone who's used it likes it. (Score:1, Informative)
anything. Keith Packard himself who wrote Xft
and fontconfig, requested that this new code
be put into use once it was considered stable,
and once Keith considered it to be stable, the
code was added to the distribution. It is very
high quality font rendering code, and although
an official XFree86 release has not shipped
with it in it yet, Keith maintains all of these
libraries, etc. on his own separate from XFree86
and deemed them ready for public usage.
Now users can enjoy the fruits of Keith's and
other's hard work today, instead of having to
wait 6 months for an XFree86 release to come
out that contains the stuff, and another 2, 3,
or even 5 months after that for a distribution
to ship any of it.
It exists now, in Red Hat Linux 8. No need
to wait for 2005.