KDE’s boys in the band are telling their story in a feature-length documentary. You might want to put some extra butter on your popcorn.
I know what I’m going to be doing tomorrow (that would be Wednesday October 14) at about 1:30 pm Eastern Time. I’ll be removing some Movietime popcorn from the microwave and curling up next to my laptop to watch the world premiere of “KDE: The Documentary.”
Well, I think it’s a world premiere, but I could’ve just made that part up.
I knew I *probably* wanted to see it as soon as I heard about it, but I knew I really wanted to see it as soon as I watched the trailer, which you can watch too since it’s right below this paragraph.
The thing that really roped me in was the talk about the whole Qt brouhaha, which was quite the thing in the last few years of the 20th century when nothing could be open source if it didn’t pass the Free Software sniff test. If you’re a 25-year-old open source nerd, you’re definitely going to need to see this to understand what you missed by being late to the show because you weren’t born yet. As a gray-haired old lady, I just want to see what the boys in the band have to say about themselves now.
Twentysomethings might also get to see what life was like back in the day when KDE was pretty much the face of desktop Linux because little sister Gnome was still a toddler and unsteady on her feet. I’m also wondering if we’ll learn why the Gnome folks thought the panel belonged at the top of the screen — which is how I remember it from looking at it and scratching my head in the days of Mandrake.
According to the press kit — with 8×10 color photos with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one to be used as evidence — that we got here at FOSS Force, the docu-flick is feature-length and all about the “international free software community behind the Plasma desktop” (hmmm, does somebody not understand that KDE didn’t always mean “Plasma”). It also mentions all the cool and groovy K-apps (like Krita and Kdenlive, but not Kmail), and other KDE apps, like Dolphin, and Okular.
I still use Okular, BTW, although these days I use Xfce instead of KDE, even though I can’t remember why.
The movie includes KDE’s beginnings in 1996, when Matthias Ettrich posted to Usenet asking for programmers to help build a consistent, usable desktop for that newfangled Linux thing that all the nerds were playing with. It purports to tell the whole story (but since I don’t have a crystal ball anymore, I won’t know for sure until I see it), including the already mentioned dispute over Qt’s licence which split the free desktop world and led to the creation of Gnome; the growth of an ecosystem of applications; the KDE 4.0 release in 2008. The latter didn’t look so bad after the release of Gnome 3, especially since — the way I remember it — the KDE folks listened while the Gnome folks stuck to their guns and continued to piss everybody off (and generate a boatload of Gnome 2 wannabe DEs).
The documentary is being sold as interview-based, with an interview list that seems like a Who’s Who (or is that Who’s Whom?) of Linux yesterday and today (apologies to the Beatles… well, to Paul and Ringo):
- Matthias Ettrich, KDE founder
- Eirik Chambe-Eng and Lars Knoll, of Trolltech and Qt
- Miguel de Icaza, co-founder of GNOME
- Aaron Seigo, Albert Astals Cid, Cornelius Schumacher, Eike Hein, Eva Brucherseifer, Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, Martin Konold, Nate Graham and Sebastian Kügler
The film is free to watch on CultRepo’s YouTube channel, or you can save yourself the trouble of clicking the link and just join the embedded version we’ve conveniently placed at the article’s end (you can then click “full screen mode” to keep from having to endure our page design).
“KDE has been offering a viable alternative to big tech for 30 years,” Emma Tracey, founder of CultRepo, said in a statement. “And now, in a time where individuals, businesses and countries are looking for greater tech sovereignty, KDE feels more relevant than ever. KDE set the model for how open source communities should operate, and its continued success shows the strength of the free software philosophy that has inspired millions.”
Ms. Tracey sent an email reply when I told her we’d be covering this. She was nice enough, and enthusiastic, so don’t be mean to her if you watch it and for some reason don’t like it.
It should be good. As I said, the trailer (film, not house) looked more than promising. Also, CultRepo has been specializing in documentaries about programming languages and open source software since 2018, which means that not only were they born eight years ago and not yesterday, they should also know the territory.
Oh, and in case you missed it, you shouldn’t take my words too seriously here. It’s like Mick Jagger said about the “Some Girls” song: “If you can’t take a joke, it’s too fucking bad.”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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