KDE on KDE 4.0 (Groklaw)

KDE on KDE 4.0 (Groklaw)

Posted Jul 19, 2008 14:38 UTC (Sat) by malor (subscriber, #2973)
In reply to: KDE on KDE 4.0 (Groklaw) by nix
Parent article: KDE on KDE 4.0 (Groklaw)

A point-zero release means that the devs think a piece of software is stable and feature-complete. It's a claim that it's done and ready for public consumption. Now, reality often differs from that. Some organizations do better than others, but at least the devs are trying. If a point-zero release is broken, it's at least inadvertent.

In this case, neither of those things were true. It was a point zero release that the devs knew perfectly well was very unstable, with an API still in flux. Not everything was even written yet. Calling that a .0 release, no matter how many caveats you hang off it, is guaranteed to mislead users who aren't really paying attention that day, or who figure that the people warning them away are overreacting; this is KDE, after all. How badly could it be broken?

Call it 4.0 beta something and everyone is happy. Nobody gets mad if it falls apart into smoking pieces. Beg and plead for testers if needed. Calling it even an RC candidate would have been misleading, since it wasn't ready to be released yet.

Giving it full point-zero status was an outright lie. It netted them a minor short-term gain with a probable larger long-term loss; how many users are on GNOME now because of this? Even if it's just a few hundred, that's a real loss for a gain that appears, as far as I can see, entirely theoretical.

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(oh, and before you start listing commercial software with borked .0 releases; payware
sometimes has to ship to make the quarter.  Open source has no such need.  There's no fiscal
pressure to release before a product is ready.)

Technically, I think you are right. KDE lost credibility and potential users/testers because
of this. 

But I also think that there is no need for all this negativity. Everybody is bound to screw up
once in a while. While they failed in labeling the  release or communicating it, they didn't
fail as developers - the technology is great (or will be) - and that's what really matters. 

I think it is important for KDE users and supporters not to make a too big deal out of it.