Adios Chicos, 25 Years of KDE

GNU would never promote Flatpak, because Flathub isn't FOSS-only, and bringing proprietary software vendors into the Linux ecosystem seems like it was one of the goals of Flatpak into the first place.

Yes, sure. Any such new cooperative wouldn’t automatically come with the colleagues or contract/revenue which his former employer had just handed off to the newly formed business discussed in the blog post, and its creation wouldn’t solve the feelings of hurt or betrayal which the post describes after he was excluded from certain discussions and interpersonally cut off by people he had considered friends.

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.

Good to know! To be clear, when I said “only some would be tech bro wannabes”, I was commenting on the general pattern and not the specific incident or people. I didn’t mean that assertion to imply anything about any of the particular individuals or companies involved in this story.

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.)

These are well-renowned books but I agree that it was hard to get started writing windows software. Win16 and Win32 were very strange APIs with a mixture of having to do things yourself, having the OS do it for you, and the OS calling you at unexpected times to get things done. WndProcs were re-entrant, because while you are handling WM_MOUSE you could get called by the OS to do a WM_PAINT. The whole architecture lends itself to spaghetti.

Or, you could use MFC, and then you just had to trust the library to do things right. Debugging your code wasn't easy because it would get lost in things that MFC was doing that you don't fully understand. A lot of the source code was available, however.

Or, you could use WTL, which was a third party library at the time that gave you a different way of doing it.

Debugging into/through Windows itself was really difficult due to the lack of source code. All you had were symbols and assembly. Because of how it worked, you could easily find memory corruption in your program because of some boneheaded thing you did, but finding the cause of it was hard because of its highly non-sequential nature.

Qt had a nicer approach with signals and slots, and used a more object-oriented way of building the software. Software was easier to understand. It also worked on Windows, but IIRC that part wasn't free. It is a long time since the late 90s so I am not sure about my memory. I enjoyed using Qt, though, and found it to be a much better programming model than straight Win32 or MFC. KDE was a great little system circa 2000, and it introduced the Konqueror browser that gave us the future we have today.

Anyhow, that is a lot to say that I understand how an intelligent person could read Petzold and still feel like a dummy. Writing Windows software in the late 90s/early 2000s was often humbling and there wasn't as much support from things like StackOverflow and the rest at the time.