On 03/10/2010 12:11 AM, David C. Rankin wrote:
There has been a really good upside to the kde4 fiasco. I never would have learned about all the really good desktop choices out there.
That is a useful side effect! Anything that makes you learn something can't be a bad thing! :-)
Things would have turned out so much differently if they just would have built upon the solid foundation of kde3 and incrementally added the eye-candy. But in reality, I think what happened was, they simply bit off more than they could chew and the size of the bite they had taken didn't become apparent until it was much too late.
My guess as to what happened (and yes, it is a total W.A.G., based on no hard info) is that the devs got "bored" doing KDE3, and were much more interested in doing the "fun" work of working on a desktop that had a cool, new usability paradigm. Were they a for-profit company, they'd likely have pretty majorly screwed themselves by doing this, since they would have been writing software for themselves, instead of for their paying customers. But as an open source project, they obviously have a lot more freedom to indulge those desires. That said, I don't personally share that view. Even when I work on open source software, I still feel an obligation to "satisfy the customer" (i.e., the user). But there's certainly a sizable enough precedent of open source projects that were started solely to satisfy the founder's itch, that this isn't such a huge anomaly. Still, the risk that a founder takes when doing that is that they may wind up working on a project that nobody (or at least only a handful of people) is using. It remains to be seen whether that'll be the case with KDE4 going forward.
The irony is, they could still pick up the kde3 code base, move forward with the incremental addition of the eye-candy and still finish that project with a rock solid desktop -- 2 years before kde4 will ever come to fruition...
I suspect you're probably right. The amount of time it would take to add KDE4 functionality into KDE3 is almost certainly several years less than it would take to do the reverse. Best, DR