Aaron Seigo talks life, free software and reinventing the Desktop (ComputerWorld)

> About the worst case, Canonical employee claim that upstream will not continue to support
KDE 3.5 codebase long enough but they never asked the KDE project and that claim is wrong.
Also they would not be the alone one doing the work, as eg Novell supports KDE 3.5 code base
as part of SLED 10 until 2011 (extended even 2013).

I disagree with the first part, and agree with the second one.

1. The KDE project can say that it intends to support KDE 3.5.x for 3 years, but Canonical is
being realistic here: KDE is a volunteer project. Supporting KDE 3.5.x is not a glorious job,
and hence most people will prefer to hack on 4.x. Furthermore, the KDE project cannot *commit*
in any binding sense to supporting KDE 3.5.x for three years, such a commitment has no
standing. The volunteer developers can change their minds tomorrow - one of the perks of being
a volunteer. Canonical feels that this is too risky, and I tend to agree.

2. You're right about Novell, Canonical wouldn't be alone with the problem. While it doesn't
solve the problem, it might make it much more reasonable. So I do see your point - Canonical
could have made an effort to support Kubuntu as LTS for 8.04.

>> Canonical was very open about the reasons for not LTSing Kubuntu

>Wrong, they pushed forward faulty arguments like the state of KDE4 and the one you mention.

Why does their presented reasoning being supposedly faulty automatically mean that they
weren't honest about that reasoning?

Plus it depends on the company. 

Many companies do work "with" their employees. That's the point of a 'company'.. a company of
people working together to accomplish some goal. And often that goal is not profit oriented,
although profits are certainly wanted. Money is more then just providing for your basic
needs.. by pooling resources it makes it possible to accomplish other life goals that
otherwise would be impossible to accomplish on your own.


Everybody is different, and so is corporations. Generally larger corporations are all pretty
soul-less.. and this is because the original people that made the company are usually all long
gone and they are publicly traded. The board of directors in a publicly traded corporation are
generally just profit oriented and most people high-up only care abotu their paticular segment
of the business. When businesses get very large there has to be internal divisions and such to
keep in managable by humans. 

But that sort of thing is actually the minority of cases. At least in the U.S. . Most people
work for small to medium sized businesses that are mostly privately owned. Also the they are
the most productive sort of businesses providing most of the manufacturing and services for
the economy. (the large corporations own most of the capital though, they have the big bucks
to do big projects) This is why paying to the ebb and flow of the stock market in order to
gauge our economy is largely pointless... it's largely illusionary anyways.

With the case of QT and Trolltech there are many ways that they can survive mostly intact
inside of Nokia. They seem to be productive sorts of people and thus it would be more
attractive to treat Trolltech as a seperate company inside of their own company. A sattilite
group that they have oversight control of.


There are cases of software companies getting tired of their larger corporate owners and
breaking away from them. 

One big example of this is Bungie Studios, the people that created the 'Halo' franchise, was
purchased by Microsoft in 2000 and integrated into Microsoft Game Studios division. They
produced many games for Microsoft and in 2007 they purchased their company back from Microsoft
to create the now independant Bungie LLC.