Employed KDE developers... [LWN.net]

Employed KDE developers...

Posted Aug 11, 2011 13:27 UTC (Thu) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742)
Parent article: Desktop Summit: Large companies and open source

From what I know, the number of developers employed to work full-time on KDE is quite small, nowhere near 80%.
My impression is that even 20% is still quite optimistic for KDE.

At least I do my work on KDE in my spare time.

Alex, KDE buildsystem maintainer

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Employed KDE developers...

Posted Aug 11, 2011 14:27 UTC (Thu) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (1 responses)

I was kind of surprised by that remark of Dirk's as well. He said people were working on open source because they are paid for it; but even if I'm paid to work on free software, that's only because I was passionate enough about free software to make it my job, after many years of putting in an enormous amount of spare time

It almost sounds as if as soon you're paid for it, it stops being a passion and is done just for the money.

And even then... In the evenings and weekends I still work on open source as a volunteer, for Krita. So I am in both positions. How should I be counted? 0.5 volunteer, 0.5 corporate paid drone who accidentally works on free software?

I think this whole "don't think that open source is still an idealistic volunteer movement -- people are paid to do it!" idea is a fallacy. Even when it's said about the Linux kernel, but even more when it's said about a project like KDE.

Boudewijn (Krita maintainer since 2003, Calligra developer since 2003, KO GmbH founder since 2007 and paid to hack on Calligra among other things since 2009.)

Employed KDE developers...

Posted Aug 12, 2011 22:22 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

It almost sounds as if as soon you're paid for it, it stops being a passion and is done just for the money.

I didn't get that from the (article's description of) the talk. I got, "as soon as you're paid for it, your opinion about how you should do it is a lot less relevant."

Wouldn't you think that when a company pays hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for developers to work on an open source project that the company would expect to control what work those developers do?

Dirk is saying if you want participation of a company's check book in an open source project, you should also plan for the company's participation in setting the project's direction. And he talks a little about how a business might move the project in different ways than a hobbyist/idealist would.

Employed KDE developers...

Posted Aug 18, 2011 10:09 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

For GNOME it is not true as well, as reported in the GNOME census report. See http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/28/gnome-census/ (not loading atm for me). Strangely, during the talk he said it was difficult to find these figures, while IMO that's just bad preparation.

Actual quote from the blog (Google cache) just mentions most people are volunteers, but if you're paid you're able to create more commits:

While over 70% of GNOME developers identify themselves as volunteers, over 70% of the commits to the GNOME releases are made by paid contributors

I was not happy with the talk. I don't think anyone involved with GNOME would say "you're an idiot" or give "vicious response" as feedback. I just don't see such behaviour (I read 30-40 GNOME mailing list though not as many bugs as I used to). Such behaviour (by anyone) is not considered acceptable.

There was some things I agreed with (better feedback on design decisions; watch out for too much control from one company; try and use the resources companies have available; more triagers for Bugzilla; more developers; some bad behaviour on non-GNOME infrastructure), but.. well.. overall I didn't feel like the GNOME as I know it was discussed.