The Pillars of KDE 'Now'

Who here remembers the "Pillars of KDE 4"?

Who here remembers the "Pillars of #KDE 4?" What are the pillars of KDE "now"? #freesoftware #opensource — Paul Adams (@therealpadams) December 6, 2014

As you can see, I asked the Internet (and got little response). I was attending MeetingC++ as I wrote that tweet and spoke to some KDE folk who were attending. Between us (and online) we could remember:

Oxygen, Sonnet (remember that?), Solid, Plasma, Akonadi and Decibel... This list in one way or another might be wrong. Not so cool. But you know what is cool? People remembered the Pillars of KDE 4 existed and the effect they had.

What Were Those Pillars All About?

For me, the Pillars of KDE 4 were a battlecry: "KDE 4 is coming and these are its foundations! Look out!". Or something like that. When I first got involved with the KDE community KDE 4 development was in full swing and the first release was about 8 months away and these "pillars" were everywhere. We used them internally as points of coordination and we used them externally as points of marketing.

In my recent conversation I heard the pillars referred to as "just a piece of marketing". Humph. No, this was only oneof their functions and, for me, by far the least important.

The Pillars of KDE 4 were talismans. The community's good luck charms that we rallied around. The "things" that helped us to identify what was crucial to KDE 4. For me the keyword was "experience". All of these talismans were keys features of the KDE 4 experience; key technologies that were going to ensure our users (old and new) enjoyed "experiencing freedom".

I love "Experience Freedom" as KDE's tagline: what more prominent experience do computer users have, then their desktop?

Step Back In Time With Paul Adams

Once upon a time I was a teenager. It was back then that I discovered Free Software and first become involved. I was using Red Hat Linux or SunOS at school. GNOME was not to my taste (although not bad) and CDE was an affront. I build a preview of KDE 3 from a magazine cover CD and never looked back.

Why?

KDE has always been an extremely well-integrated experience. Sure, there are always things to be "polished" but, in general, everything worked and, more importantly, everything worked together. KDE was the one Free desktop where everything felt nicely integrated. It felt like a thoughtful product.

But KDE is no-longer a desktop. Remember? Wikipedia tells us:

KDE (/ˌkeɪdiːˈiː/) is an international free software community producing an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Microsoft Windows, and OS X systems. It is known for its Plasma Desktop, a desktop environment provided as the default working environment on many Linux distributions, such as openSUSE, Mageia and Kubuntu and is default desktop environment on PC-BSD, a BSD operating system.

So What Is KDE?

The official party line (as supported by the Wikipedia entry) is that KDE is the community. KDE is a community of skilled individuals who all pull together to produce various ingegrated technologies, one of which happens to be a desktop (for various platforms). Many of the other projects directly relate to that desktop.

Hmmm... But wait a second. We have a separate definition, in the form of the KDE Manifesto:

We are a community of technologists, designers, writers and advocates who work to ensure freedom for all people through our software.

OK, so this is certainly compatible with the previous definition. Although perhaps a little less specific. Again, the clear point here is that KDE is a community. And this is something I feel increasingly dissatisfied with. What was wrong with KDE being a desktop with a well-integrated collection of awesome applications (which were also able to be run independently of that desktop on all major platforms)?

No really, what?

The Great KDE Disintegration

I first got involved with KDE because I was studying the management of Free Software communities for my PhD. In particular I was concerned about how communities remain productive. At the time I regularly made one specific warning: moving from centralised VCS to distributed will have enormous social implications way beyond the technical ramifications if the process is not monitored and managed properly.

Why? Because the VCS is a tool we communicate through. It is the most crucial tool we communicate through and it dictates how we can build our product(s). The way in which we design our software structure is constrained by how we communicate. Fundamentally change your communication structure and you will be forced to fundamentally change how your structure your code. This is called Conway's Law; I've mentioned it before in this blog and elsewhere. I dare you (nay, double dare you) to try and tell me that somehow it does not apply to Free Software or, more specifically, KDE. Go on. Give it a try.

With SVN KDE had a massive and unwieldy, but integrated codebase (heck, it was all in the same repo!). The community was also massive and unwieldy. But it was well-integrated and this was reflected in the product. KDE 3 was a phenomenon and so was KDE 4 early on.

Then we switched to GIT.

KDE became a collection of projects because each component of the community got its own repo. And we stopped working together as much. Our development became silo'd. There was even some weird behaviour within these silos. (My personal favourite... Adriaan de Groot being told to create his own repo for FreeBSD integration work for a particular application. Apparently creating a branch to work on in the existing repo was a bit too much to ask.)

Then it happened.

We became so disintegrated as a community that this became our branding. We, explicitly, stopped being a desktop project and became a collection of projects, one of which happened to be a desktop.

Let me be clear:

The VCS changed, this forced changes in the community structure and how we communicated, which encouraged us to rebrand in order to closer match our new communication patterns and how we view ourselves.

And, thanks to Melvin Conway, KDE became a less-integrated experience.

The Pillars of KDE "Now"

KDE 4 had its pillars. As the community disintegrated they fell to the wayside.

The KDE community continues to produce excellent technology. In particular, Plasma 5 is shaping up very nicely (although it is still not quite "there" enough for me to use it as my main desktop yet). But, inevitably, the fractured nature of the community will reflect in the user experience and, at that point, one of our killer features (being "the integrated experience") will be gone.

So I'm left wondering, what are the pillars of KDE now? What are the "things" we, as a community, can all get behind and say "these are the things that underpin the KDE experience".

Akonadi? Baloo? KF5? Plasma? Telepathy? KTeaTime? Heck... I'm gonna throw Akademy into the mix.

In Conclusion

Switching to GIT has brought many benefits to KDE (none of which are discussed here). But it has caused us social problems which will inevitably reflect in our products. It already reflects in our messaging, so it is really just a matter of (not much) time.

I think it is about time we took action to socially reintegrate before becoming a totally disperate collection of technologies. My 2c: KDE was strongest when we were all marching towards KDE 4, when the "pillars" were our talismans and we were one in community and vision.

So, tell me, what are the pillars of KDE "Now"?

KDEPIM: Any More Guesses?

Yesterday I posed a somewhat cryptic question: what happened in KDEPIM in late 2010 that might have caused such a dramatic spike in an unnamed (but real) metric? I want to leave the conversation running a little bit longer. So here is some further food for thought, to keep you guessing...

Some things to note:

• The new metric is developer count... the number of unique contributors to KDEPIM each month;
• Careful! These two plots are not on the same scale. Note the two different Y-axis scales. Mystery plot on the left, developer count on the right;
• It may (or may not) be important that the huge spike in the mystery metric just so happens to be followed by a significant (for some definition of significant) drop in developer count. Again... I'm not going to tell you what the mystery metric is, but I will say that, in this case, causality is not out of the question. The huge spike in the mystery metric arguably, in some small way, might have contributed to the later drop in developers.

I'm now going to leave this "out there" for a day or two before getting back to it. This buys you guys some time to come up with some more suggestions as to what the mystery metric might be (and what caused the spike in it).

It also buys me some time to find out (for definite) what caused the spike... After all, I do know what the mystery metric is!

In Conclusion

Yes, I do know that the previously-red plot is now green and the new plot is red. One day I will master GNUPlot.

The Great GNOME/Groupon Spat of 2014

If you have had your head in the sand today you might well have missed the story that the GNOME Foundation and Groupon are is a disagreement over the use of "GNOME".  I already shared my thoughts in Tweet form earlier... But now I'd like to talk a little more. Not about the event, but about how we (the Free Software community) reacted to it.

Hey #KDE, our friends in the #GNOME project are being attacked by a corporation that should know better. http://t.co/xzfdvp7GMt #opensource — Paul Adams (@therealpadams) November 11, 2014

Where Do We Get Our News?

The first I heard about the GNOME/Group affair was on Facebook. A former colleague and friend of mine posted a link to the request for aid from the GNOME Foundation. Whilst it is no secret that I am a KDE user, community member and general doer-of-stuff, I am not tribal about it. Healthy competition breeds choice and innovation and am very happy that the GNOME project (along with all the other Free Software desktops) exist. What I saw here was something very simple: an attack by a wealthy corporation on a Free Software project.

Wait... what? "Attack"?

Like many people, my first reaction was one of "What. The. Hey? How dare this company attack my sisters and brother in Free Software?" Aaron Seigo kick-started a discussion on G+ about how we reacted to this situation and in particular, knowing that I would engage rather than enrage, picked up on my Tweet/G+ post. Sadly the conversation he started degraded, largely because some of the people engaging were failing to understand what he was saying... I digress...

I do not want to get into a discussion about the semantics of "attack". I stand by my assertion this is an attack. Why? The GNOME Foundation "call to arms" made it clear there has been an engagement with Groupon (they do have to defend the GNOME trademark after all) and that the engagement has broken down to the point they need to legally defend their trademark. For me, for right or for wrong, it is simple: allowing the situation to degrade to the point of lawyers needing to be deployed to actively stop trademark registrations is an attack of sorts. Groupon is large enough and smart enough to know that such a legal fight will cost GNOME dearly and allowing the discussion to degrade this far could easily be seen as an unpleasant tactic and an attack in itself.

Or perhaps not. More on this later.

What I want to focus on here is not on what we all wrote, but no how we wrote it.

With All Due Respect!

There is a frequently-used joke in my office about the passive aggression of the Brits. We are, after all, masters of deploying phrases such as "With all due respect..." when what we are really saying is "Look you tosser...".

My reaction to this news, as with many other people was one of anger. In my case this was fairly mild and so I think the accurate description would be "I was annoyed". It is not hard to see why so many had a similar reaction. The GNOME Foundation campaign page uses words like "defend" and "fight". They clearly feel threatened and that ain't cool.

I wrote a Tweet. Which automatically got posted to Facebook. I posted a modified (because G+ allows me to be more verbose) version on G+. Now what I was trying to do, of course, was raise some awareness of the GNOME Foundation's action...

Headless Chickens

So Aaron, perhaps a little harshly, likened the reaction of the Free Software world, in general, to headless chickens. Now Aaron's a pretty big fan of Free Software and the people who make it all happen. So he doesn't use such language lightly. Here is his own reasoning:

Yes, people are running around calling for boycotts, negative social media campaigns and flooding management inboxes .. none of which GNOME asked for .. and all within hours of hearing about the issues for the first time, and certainly having only the barest details. That's practically the definition of acting like a headless chicken.

The man has a point.

Social media allowed the Free Software community to spread the news pretty fast. Add to the pace of news the mildly aggressive language put forward by the GNOME Foundation and things escalated quickly.

By 10am I had the chance to speak face-to-face with my friend who posted the original news. Rather triumphantly he told me I should check out the shitstorm hitting Groupon's various social media outlets. Neither of us at this point had any idea about mailing campaigns.

Aaron's right: the GNOME Foundation did not call for any of this. Explicitly they asked for financial aid. Implicitly, arguably, they asked for people to spread the news. That was it. The uncoordinated "return fire" from the Free Software community on the GNOME Foundation's behalf does not paint a particularly professional picture of the Free Software community.

We let our collective anger show.

Anger Is a Gift

(Thanks, Zack de la Rocha).

I don't think there is anything particularly wrong about having gotten angry about this situation. But it really is all about how we deal with that anger.

In this case, many Free Software community members did not recognise the wishes of the GNOME Foundation: to fight this in the legal system, not in the court of public opinion. For this fight they need cash and that is what they asked for. Nothing else. Why? This is their fight (that is their word, remember) to fight the way they deem appropriate.

I am not going to comment on the GNOME Foundation's approach other than to say, if you contributed to the funding, thank you. Whether it is ultimately needed or not, your cash, I'm sure, will get put to good use in Free Software and for that we should all be grateful. Another good option would be to donate to the FSFE who, through their various campaigns are in a position to educate governments and businesses about how to deal effectively with Free Software communities (and their trademarks).

So, What Now?

Well, it looks like all the noise around this issue has had an effect. The Groupon engineering blog has this posting with the following key text:

And if we can’t come up with a resolution, we’ll be glad to look for another name.

For some definition of "win", this looks like a win to me. So long as Groupon stick to their word, keep engaging with the GNOME Foundation and, if needs be, rename their product.

So perhaps not an attack, after all. But certainly unfortunate management of the situation to allow things to get to the point that the GNOME Foundation feels a need to defend its trademarks legally. There's probably failings on both sides, if we are honest with ourselves.

But hey, a win. At what cost? Well, at the very least, Groupon (to some extent) may have an altered opinion on how it wishes to engage with Free Software. If nothing else, the eyes of the world (at least those paying attention) will have seen the collective forces of Free Software rally against Groupon and think "they probably could have done that a little more professionally".

In Conclusion

As I stated on G+:

I believe we have entered the world of social-constructivism and need to define "attack" :) How about this slightly less aggressive (and derived from +Aaron Seigo 's thoughts) language?... "This sucks for GNOME and, assuming they have acted reasonably towards Groupon, the passive aggresive attitude of Groupon towards the situation is certainly distinctly suboptimal."