Free is too expensive (Economist)

Posted Apr 2, 2012 15:20 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

That was in 2009.

Indeed. It is now 2012. There are various adjectives that one might think of when hearing this. The one that comes to my mind, considering that we have gone through 9 releases of KDE and several of Qt since when this stuff used to work, is »pathetic«. I'm deliberately not dissing John Layt here, who AFAICT did all he could to advance the issue and more, but the observation that the development processes of KDE and Qt apparently managed to stifle any sort of useful progress on an important regression like this for years, while at the same time taking on board loads and loads of completely new stuff, speaks volumes.

So just stop spouting offensive nonsense like "KDE developers primary mission in life is providing entertainment for KDE developers".

That's not what I said. I said »The KDE project's primary mission …«, which is something completely different.

The fact that there are a few developers who do feel called upon to fix these long-standing issues does not detract from the picture as a whole. The problem is really that there are apparently too few such developers. For every single KDE developer like John Layt, who I will be more than happy to ply with good German beer if he ever shows up in the Mainz area, there are probably several who are only in it for the fun. What we see as a result is a project which seems deeply in love with everything that is new and shiny and cool while not-quite-so-cool things like feature regressions from five years ago are left to a small minority of people who feel responsible enough to address them, if they are ever addressed at all. In a properly governed infrastructure-type (as opposed to fun-type) project, regressions like these would not have been allowed to arise in the first place. We're not talking about random bugs here, after all, but about things that can be documented and planned for in advance.

Let me quote from the first comment on one of the blog posts you mentioned which said

»Perhaps 2010 will become the year of the kde desktop, with complete printing options, (hopefully) network management, supported video cards and FINALLY a decent standard browser.«

It is now 2012 and at least two of these items remain on the to-do list.

Posted Apr 2, 2012 20:33 UTC (Mon) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link]

I was ready to be sympathetic, despite being one of the people who has been suffering from the lack of decent print support in KDE4. Then I read this bit in the link you provided:
The CPD solves a very specific problem, that is the broken state of print dialogs on Linux using Cups. It doesn't solve the problem we and Qt have of also supporting printing on Windows and OSX using the same API.
So there is actually a decent module to handle printing, but linux users must wait 4 years to see it, just because the same solution wouldn't work on Windows? Heck, the Windows + KDE users, if there are any, probably have other ways to deal with printing. "We don't like #ifdef" hardly seems like an adequate justification for this decision.