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The fact that money didn't necessarily reach people doing the work, doesn't mean money wasn't thrown around above their heads - which inevitably conditioned their choices. Novell didn't pay peanuts for SuSE, for example; nor did Ubuntu build a mobile OS for anything but to intercept money from mobile manufacturers. It was fairly plain to see that developers hired by those companies were given marching orders at various points; and because they inevitably were the core developers, projects steered accordingly.

(I would also add that, certainly in KDE circles, there was also a bit of a cultivated aura of rockstar developers around these fulltime hires, with folks making big calls without ever accepting they might be wrong... until several years (or decades) later.)

The fact that money didn't necessarily reach people doing the work doesn't necessarily mean that you can't make vacuous statements.

Name where that money was thrown around — if it was. Don't just name where it wasn't.

I already did: Novell paid $210m for SuSE, plus $50m they got from IBM. SuSE was always a key (if not the key) KDE "customer" and sponsor, beyond Trolltech. That was big money, back then.

A friend who worked at Suse at the time described Novell's price as a fair price for just the consulting division plus nothing for the rest. I don't remember that $50m or what it paid for.

And just after SuSE was brought almost all the KDE dev working at SuSE got fired.

Microsoft purchased Nokia’s mobile division in 2013 for $7bn.

And afterwards sold Qt and stopped financially supporting Calligra (the office suite). None of that money went to KDE, it just made the small cash flow towards KDE completely stop.

Just some companies I remember: Eazel. Ximian.

Even after FAT was cleared up, exFAT was under patents until, like, 2019 before Microsoft declared they wouldn't enforce them on Linux. That was kind of an issue for a while as exFAT is the mandatory file format of SDXC cards. If you had a SD card >=64GB before then, Linux wasn't mainlining support because the situation was too risky.

Microsoft’s exFAT Linux grant also doesn’t extend to other free software. The patents expire approximately now (2022), though, so maybe it is a moot point finally.

Is it? I'm pretty sure I've formatted them to ext2/4 before and had no issues. Seems more like SD cards are used in devices, and devices stuck to exFAT. I had to format to ext to make my 256M SD card work in my N900.

IMO that's nitpicking. Of course filesystems like ext4 work with pretty much any block device. If the standard requires only exFAT support, devices like cameras aren't gonna support anything else.

Similarly, I have a digital audio player from Shanling and the device running the Linux kernel driving the device, the only supported formats for the microSD were FAT32, NTFS, and exFAT. When I mailed about it, they said most users don't have devices to format to ext4, f2fs, etc. and there wasn't much to say I mentioned ChromeOS and Android have the mkfs right there to use.

I'm just not sure what you mean by "mandatory" here. Do you mean that manufacturers were required to ship cards formatted with exFAT, or they wouldn't be allowed to manufacture SD cards? I actually don't understand what you said, I'm not trying to be misleading.

They mean that exFAT is the only filesystem format a host device that accepts SDXC cards is required to understand, in order for that device to be certified as SDXC-compliant / get to put an SDXC logo on the box. (Also, that an SDXC card that came formatted as anything other than exFAT wouldn't be able to put the SDXC logo on the box.)

By formatting your SDXC card with any other filesystem than exFAT, you won't be able to use it in all the devices that are "minimally compliant" with the SDXC spec in that they implement exFAT support and nothing else. Where "minimally compliant" devices include: literally all digital cameras, all portable game consoles, etc. — pretty much the whole ecosystem of devices that would ever give you a reason to own any SDXC media in the first place.

Thanks for this. I still didn't understand what was meant. To be certified as taking an SDXC card (and by that to have the right to display the logo), a device was required to be able to read exFAT.

Mandatory in this case does not mean that it couldn't be formatted with something else, it doesn't mean that devices weren't allowed to read cards formatted differently, and it didn't mean that manufacturers or distributors of cards were forced to use exFAT, as long as they didn't care about the logo, and weren't concerned about customer support being overwhelmed by people screaming that their new card was broken. It does mean that if Linux couldn't read/write exFAT, it would be incompatible with most available devices, and people would be screaming about how their Linux was broken.

Got it.

Extra wrinkle: the filesystem you have to use changes based on the capacity. SDHC and SDXC are basically the same protocol, but one mandates FAT32 and the other wants exFAT. This is based on the same 32GB limit that Dave Plummer snuck into Windows NT on a whim[0], even though FAT32's structures can go up to 2TB and Windows can totally parse filesystems that large.

Some devices actually will take reformatted cards that are "technically" "out-of-spec". You aren't supposed to be able to use SDXC cards with FAT32, but devices that never bothered with exFAT will still accept them. This is in fact the only way you even can use a large card on a Nintendo 3DS.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bikbJPI-7Kg

Exactly. Unless you use SD cards exclusively on PCs and Raspberry Pis, formatting them with ext4 is as bad as changing the edge connector pinout.

I think he means default mandatory file system. You can reformat it if you want.

I feel like GNOME and KDE may have very different stories money-wise; as all the commercial "we'll sell you a support contract" players in the Linux space these days — meaning, in the last 20 years — ship GNOME-based distros.

Yep. While Red Hat doesn't "own" GNOME by any traditional definition, they definitely pay for a controlling stake in it's direction.

There is no "pay for a controlling stake", they either send engineers to work on it or they don't. GNOME is not a corporation, you cannot buy stock in it.

That's more-or-less what I'm referring to. When you're dealing with a foundation that hasn't been bothered to fix decades-old issues in their software, sending engineers and paying for man-hours is exactly what gets things done. Since you're paying the engineers, you decide what they make. That gives you a considerable amount of control over the ecosystem, and explains how Linux users ended up in a development tug-of-war with enterprise patrons.

That still does not give you any more control. Anyone can still change the project or fork it or do whatever, just they do not because only the engineers working on it are the ones who do get anything done.

Anyway, the way to fix that would be to donate more to the foundation or to individual developers. In most open source projects, the non-profit foundation is not usually the primary source of engineers because they make a tiny amount of money compared to what the big enterprises do. But it is not very likely you will ever escape that tug-of-war, because developing an entire OS is very expensive.

SUN also shiped GNOME with Solaris so i imagine they also had some money invested there.

That makes sense - wouldn't they need the expensive enterprise Qt license if they went for a Qt based distro ?

> KDE is one of the biggest softwares out there. It was the first SVN repository to reach 1 million commits, etc etc and most of it has been volunteer work. Any claim that money was thrown at KDE really upsets me because it would be a complete mischaracterization of the nature of the project and motivations of people behind it.

I think people also forget the core of KDE is Qt. I think when you think of how capable and powerful Qt is, it kind of makes sense that KDE can thrive the way it does, now I don't want to take away from KDE because no doubt they build their own things on top of Qt, but I would assume a lot of the complex heavy lifting is done by Qt in aggregate.

so .. if there was no money why were KDE folk acting like Mozilla ppl? :o

I mean when Plasma came around it was so full of bugs, the useless activity thing, etc, and bug repors were just ignored (or all the response was get HEAD and reproduce on it otherwise no one cares.)

Well, the reason KDE 4.0 was to buggy was exactly "because" KDE had contributors. Porting from Qt3 to Qt4 was a lot of work. Some volunteers completed that much much earlier than others but had to wait for others parts of the project to ship. More complex parts weren't ready yet, and as such, some contributors were losing interest. So KDE had to ship it at some point to make sure the train keeps moving.

It was a combination of the massive, massive hype train that was generated by KDE + distro's not listening to KDE's ask for 4.0 and earlier versions not being shipped that caused a massive backlash. KDE learned from the mistakes and the 4 to 5 transition and 5 to 6 transition which is in the works now are both avoiding those mistakes. But KDE did fix those bugs. Within a few releases, KDE 4 was quite usable and stable, but the damage was done.

In my opinion KDE hasn't really recovered the bad image caused by that despite the fact that its in a much better position now.

Every Gnu/Linux desktop release was like that. Gnome 1.4 had Nautilus bolted on and very slow. KDE 3 had a consistently crashing KWin that restarted on crash. After many releases they become somewhat stable, but by that time new developers come along and complain about the cruft and passé coding styles, so a new version gets started in development.

> In my opinion KDE hasn't really recovered the bad image caused by that despite the fact that its in a much better position now.

Making incompatible changes between releases (3 to 4, 4 to 5 ) certainly didn't help. Who in his right mind would want to rewrite his program every time the main library changes ?

Gnome/gtk is no different here.

It feels like an eternity now. I left KDE sole time after the KDE 4 release. Before that it felt quite polished. It never regained that polished feeling, as long as I followed it after KDE 4 released. But I hear it is good now, so perhaps it finally got it.

I recently had to dive into the world of linux GUI file managers and their various accessories after living for years pretty much exclusively with just i3wm and the terminal for that sort of basic stuff.

I uh, can't say 'polish' is a world I ever associated with the likes of Dolphin and co., or any of the alternatives if I'm being honest. I suppose there's a bit of a decent veneer there if you only judge them by screenshots and aren't terribly critical of the standard 'modern' sort of design in general.

But that falls apart real quick if you dare to think taboo words like 'configuration' or 'option.' Though I suppose at least on linux you're just in for pain as you try to figure out what to configure, and how, and disappointment when you accept that you can't actually get everything the way you want, and that whatever subset of features you want isn't actually available together. But you can make choices. You won't be that happy with it, but, at least you aren't stuck with the worst option.

To be fair, I couldn't even tell you if I ever used KDE 4 or not. So, I'm utterly useless as a point of reference. I'm just still bitter.

TBH i use Midnight commander as a file manager, but i found Xfm to be fast and configurable. KDE is slow.

This logic seems rather backwards. You think they weren’t addressing bugs because they had money?

no, I mean the core KDE developer community acted like they were flush with money, users, etc.

get HEAD and reproduce

would make a perfect kde teeshirt

> KDE is one of the biggest softwares out there. It was the first SVN repository to reach 1 million commits, etc etc

Doesn't KDE use a monorepo to store each and every project under the sun whose name starts with a K?

I vaguely recalled from way way back that even the most basic of development tasks, such as building kmail, forced developers to checkout all other projects.

This doesn't look like something to brag about.

KDE was a big monorepo but SVN allowed partial checkouts.