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Comment by chc4 | Hacker News Reader

I want to love Plasma Mobile. But development on it has always looked extremely dead every time I've checked on it since it has came out, and there are next to no phones that it's been ported to. I've never even seen someone mention using it online, unlike Ubuntu Touch or FirefoxOS or Sailfish (when they were all alive).

Honestly, it's felt like it's been thrown by the wayside ever since it came out, and that's not encouraging to the thought of running it on a phone that you'd use as a daily driver.

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Ubuntu Touch was sponsored by Canonical and Firefox OS was backed by Mozilla.

Plasma is truly a community effort. So of course you haven't heard about it much.

I think at any given time there are only a handful of paid developers employed by a few small and big companies working on it.

That means there's not much resources and almost no paid marketing. It's also not fashionable anymore.

Ubuntu Touch and FirefoxOS and a bunch of other projects got cancelled because the parent companies didn't expect a proper ROI.

Plasma Mobile has been going slow but steady. There's no company to pull off the resources.

Also, the community if determined to provide a Free As In Freedom experience on desktop. Hopefully they can do it on phones as well. Their agenda is only software freedom and privacy.

Disclaimer: Used to be a KDE contributor, in no way associated with Plasma Mobile.

"Plasma Mobile has been going slow but steady. There's no company to pull off the resources."

Then there's also no company to dedicate resources, and do the unfun work that still needs to get done.

"Their agenda is only software freedom and privacy."

I hate to say it, but I don't see the phrase "works well" and "stable" in there. Which, while fine for a desktop, is not fine for a phone.

> Also, the community if determined to provide a Free As In Freedom experience on desktop. Hopefully they can do it on phones as well. Their agenda is only software freedom and privacy.

This is contrary to the things that KDE-associated projects have traditionally valued. Software freedom has always been associated with GNU and GTK/Gnome. The philosophy behind Qt/KDE has always been that things can be considered free enough. The KDE community's willingness to tolerate a dubious licensing situation for Qt is the only reason that Gnome even exists.

That's not true.

KDE originally started using Qt which was non free.

Once the project took off and started to matter, 2 projects started to fix the non-free-Qt issue.

One was Gnome.

The other one was KDE's attempt to write a free Qt clone.

But soon TrollTech approached KDE and agreed to open source Qt.

There the KDE Free Qt Foundation was created.

https://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation....

I can assure you that Software Freedom is on top of KDE's priorities.

KDE has refused to even use anything non-free even in its infrastructure.

I don't see how you can point to the years where Qt used a bad license, without seeing that the only statement that it proves is not true is the one where you wrote "that's not true". (And there were plenty of people arguing at that time that the Qt license was no big deal and the free desktop community should just move on to more productive things.)

I know what Qt's licensing situation is now. But it being under a free license today doesn't mean that software freedom is one of two things that the KDE community cares about above all else. If I meet a man today and he's wearing a blue shirt, that doesn't mean it's true that you can infer his personal moral code means he will only wear blue shirts. (In fact, it can still be untrue even if he personally tells you that this is his code.)

KDE is 21 years old. It's been 19 years since Qt has been FOSS.

And within those 2 years, there was an attempt to rewrite Qt to be FOSS.

Also KDE Community has evolved during the past two decades.

You're not really addressing things I've written.

If a guy has been wearing blue shirts for 19 years straight, it's probably a safe bet that he'll be wearing blue shirts for the years to come.

Three things:

- My goal isn't to argue with someone who's just looking to have an argument with me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15250932

- Strain-the-metaphor is a terrible way to find clarity about anything, and a terribly unfun game to play along the way.

- Once again: this doesn't really address the things I've written.

Sorry, I honestly didn't know you were the same person.

I'll rephrase it: If a project has been using FOSS for 19 years straight, it's probably a safe bet that they'll be using FOSS for the years to come. It's time to accept that they're about freedom, and forgive them for their mishap from two decades ago.

You said KDE was non-free and therefore it doesn't respect freedom that much.

I argued that KDE acknowledged that depending on a non-free toolkit was not really OK for a free desktop. Therefore, from the very beginning it tried to fix that. And it succeeded very early by making Qt go open source.

Even rms considers KDE free.

> You said KDE was non-free and therefore it doesn't respect freedom that much.

See, the issue is that I've written what I meant to say, but you're substituting those comments with whatever you seem to want me to have said instead and implicitly asking me to take responsibility for your version.

> But it being under a free license today doesn't mean that software freedom is one of two things that the KDE community cares about above all else.

I don't think that you can really compare the KDE community of 1997 and the KDE community of 2017.

https://community.kde.org/KDE/Mission

This difference has been eliminated for so long, I really don't think it can be taken as reason to say that GNOME represents more freedom.

To me, KDE represents more freedom, because on the secondary level, that is customizability, open development and taking community wishes into consideration, they are so far ahead of GNOME.

KDE community is awesome and all they needed to revive things around plasma mobile effort is to have dedicated device and with Librem5 they would get exactly that.

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