The other side of the story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45266332
While building a career over such a project like KDE is certainly laudable it seems it leaves people in a very precarious position where the number of companies worldwide where you can be employed at any given time can be counted with the fingers in one hand, with some to spare
Your average KDE contributor is an expert in at least two widely used technologies, C++ and Qt, and typically in several more. Purely KDE-related work may not be a huge employment market, but trust me it's not that hard for KDE folks to find work in general, and you will find them in many high places.
That is to say that contributing is definitely not putting you into any precarious career positions :-)
But it seems most members of the community keep looking for jobs within the community and forget to look elsewhere
But that organization operates on a one person, one vote model, not a one dollar, one vote model. He seems to want one person to put in a disproportionate amount of investment capital and end up with a disproportionate amount of voting authority. That’s not the kind of “cooperative socialist” model which Jonathan was advocating, it’s a standard capitalist one.
And I’m not saying that he has no right in the way the world works now to operate as a capitalist. He does. But he shouldn’t be surprised if someone who wants a cooperative model doesn’t view that as even aspirationally qualifying and isn’t satisfied by vague comments about how workers can gradually buy their way toward an approximation of equal power.
[0] https://pointieststick.com/2025/03/10/personal-and-professio...
My point is simply this: Nate shouldn’t pretend that the model he’s proposing is or ever will become the kind of thing Jonathan is advocating for, because it’s not and will not, but I think Nate is pretending that.
From what Jonathan wrote, I also don’t think he intended to storm out. I think he intended to advocate for something, likely with enough frustration and emotion that others who disagreed with him noticed the intensity of his feelings, and they decided to exclude him from further discussions to avoid drama rather than ever engaging with him to give their firm final decision in a calm but explicit way. They weren’t willing to give him a clear final no and instead ostracized him as part of their implicitly stated no.
To be clear, I agree with your implication that Jonathan likely didn’t handle this in the way that would be best for his professional career going forward, insofar as he may not have been calm and diplomatic in his private advocacy and then went quite public with the level of venting we just read. But Nate’s response didn’t make him look good either; it felt as disingenuous as Jonathan’s earnest blog post may have been interpersonally unwise.
Personally I prefer earnest but interpersonally unwise over disingenuous, since it’s easier to fix with constructive criticism and emotional support. But I know a lot of investors and employers don’t feel that way.
I've been in similar situations, and it's hard to stay professional in those cases. The feeling of personal betrayal is significant. Add to this that most old-school Linux hackers like him are often motivated by striving for social justice, and somewhat expect everyone who works with them to fundamentally wish the same things. Discovering that long-term collaborators actually wish to be regular techbros, must sting.
That said, only some of them would be tech bro wannabes. Others might not want to try to rock the boat in this awful economy, in the sense of not wanting the career consequences of having been part of a failed attempt to form a cooperative when the company ends up capitalist in the end, or simply might be skeptical that a cooperative would succeed well enough to meet their genuine financial needs.
I am a Debian developer myself, though quite inactive for the last 6 or so years due to life circumstances. Plenty of people even in that world end up working for the man, in such forms as Google or Dropbox or the like, even if they’d rather not. Life is expensive and the world is capitalist with bills to pay.
I just want to say that none of that team are "techbros" or in it for the money. I was a volunteer, entirely unpaid KDE contributor for another 7 years before BS came along, and many of the other contractors and employees were similarly long-time contributors already. BS as well operated for a long time without a specific profit motive.
I was the person who very initially set up the Valve project that TP now continues to work on, and as a team we simply took to the idea of working with Valve because it meant having a solid customer who was interested in doing foundational work upstream to improve KDE software, which is what we all wanted to do the most. Valve's user audience - gamers who take their computers seriously and love using them - overlaps KDE's in spirit in many ways, Valve's engineers absolutely know their stuff and ask for the right things, and it all made a lot of mission sense immediately.
This is all very much still done by oldschool hackers who will keep the lights on probably till the end of their productive careers.
In other words, I meant “only some of the people in the industry who react to situations like this the way Jonathan’s peers seem to have according to his blog post would be tech bro wannabes”. That may very well not be true for anyone at Blue Systems / Techpaladin, and indeed my point was that it would be true for “only some” such people in the industry in general and definitely not true for all of them.
The only reason I even addressed the possibility of the “techbro” mindset at all is because it was mentioned by the person I was replying to; it wouldn’t have otherwise been something I would have thought to mention in this context.
I do have quite a high general opinion of the ethics of KDE hackers as well as the technical side of Valve. (I have no strong opinion either positive or negative on the business side of Valve, though I do appreciate their kindness in sharing Steam keys for their products with Debian developers back when they were basing SteamOS on Debian as well as allowing Debian to distribute Steam in its non-free section.)
My guess since he’s talking about IRS rules is because the IRS doesn’t recognize those exemptions specifically and so it’s irrelevant for the federal structure of the company which they also have to have. Technically speaking even LLCs don’t really exist at the federal level. The IRS does note that it is a legal structure that states provide, but also notes that depending on how you’re structured, they will treat you as either a non-entity (basically pass through, like a sole proprietorship), as a partnership (collective pass through, no liability shields) or as a full corporation (S or C corp). There is a little bit in Subchapter T around taxing businesses that operate under a “cooperative basis” but it still seems like you’re still either a corporation or a partnership
They only have member/owners who are entitled to exactly one vote by virtue of having made the rather nominal member investment (and not having redeemed that investment after leaving the coop), or having joined too soon before the vote to have yet missed the deadline to make that investment.
When I say rather nominal member investment, I mean $100, or $10 for people receiving certain low-income government benefits. (They also have a once-per-lifetime non-refundable joining fee of $25 or $5 respectively.) Nothing like the $100k example Nate gave in his comment for a dominant shareholder not happy with the prospect of being outvoted by others with much smaller investments.
But certainly no business, whether cooperative or fully capitalist, has exclusivity on participating in KDE, nor has he been banned from the community. This is more about him feeling ostracized and unwelcome than formally forbidden, and also about him being surprised that his priorities around the structure and ownership of the new business weren’t shared by his colleagues.