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> money was being thrown around Im not really educated about the GNOME world, but I was involved on KDE side of things (very minor contributor). Money was _ne

• gjsman-1000 4y ago
  Even after FAT was cleared up, exFAT was under patents until, like, 2019 before Microsoft declared they wouldn't enforce them on Linux. That was kind of an issue for a while as exFAT is the mandatory file format of SDXC cards. If you had a SD card >=64GB before then, Linux wasn't mainlining support because the situation was too risky.
  • pessimizer 4y ago
    Is it? I'm pretty sure I've formatted them to ext2/4 before and had no issues. Seems more like SD cards are used in devices, and devices stuck to exFAT. I had to format to ext to make my 256M SD card work in my N900.
    • NavinF 4y ago
      IMO that's nitpicking. Of course filesystems like ext4 work with pretty much any block device. If the standard requires only exFAT support, devices like cameras aren't gonna support anything else.
      • pessimizer 4y ago
        I'm just not sure what you mean by "mandatory" here. Do you mean that manufacturers were required to ship cards formatted with exFAT, or they wouldn't be allowed to manufacture SD cards? I actually don't understand what you said, I'm not trying to be misleading.
        • derefr 4y ago
          They mean that exFAT is the only filesystem format a host device that accepts SDXC cards is required to understand, in order for that device to be certified as SDXC-compliant / get to put an SDXC logo on the box. (Also, that an SDXC card that came formatted as anything other than exFAT wouldn't be able to put the SDXC logo on the box.) By formatting your SDXC card with any other filesystem than exFAT, you won't be able to use it in all the devices that are "minimally compliant" with the SDXC spec in that they implement exFAT support and nothing else. Where "minimally compliant" devices include: literally all digital cameras, all portable game consoles, etc. — pretty much the whole ecosystem of devices that would ever give you a reason to own any SDXC media in the first place.
          • NavinF 4y ago
            Exactly. Unless you use SD cards exclusively on PCs and Raspberry Pis, formatting them with ext4 is as bad as changing the edge connector pinout.
          • pessimizer 4y ago
            Thanks for this. I still didn't understand what was meant. To be certified as taking an SDXC card (and by that to have the right to display the logo), a device was required to be able to read exFAT. Mandatory in this case does not mean that it couldn't be formatted with something else, it doesn't mean that devices weren't allowed to read cards formatted differently, and it didn't mean that manufacturers or distributors of cards were forced to use exFAT, as long as they didn't care about the logo, and weren't concerned about customer support being overwhelmed by people screaming that their new card was broken. It does mean that if Linux couldn't read/write exFAT, it would be incompatible with most available devices, and people would be screaming about how their Linux was broken. Got it.
    • brian_herman 4y ago
      I think he means default mandatory file system. You can reformat it if you want.
  • loeg 4y ago
    Microsoft’s exFAT Linux grant also doesn’t extend to other free software. The patents expire approximately now (2022), though, so maybe it is a moot point finally.
• toyg 4y ago
  The fact that money didn't necessarily reach people doing the work, doesn't mean money wasn't thrown around above their heads - which inevitably conditioned their choices. Novell didn't pay peanuts for SuSE, for example; nor did Ubuntu build a mobile OS for anything but to intercept money from mobile manufacturers. It was fairly plain to see that developers hired by those companies were given marching orders at various points; and because they inevitably were the core developers, projects steered accordingly. (I would also add that, certainly in KDE circles, there was also a bit of a cultivated aura of rockstar developers around these fulltime hires, with folks making big calls without ever accepting they might be wrong... until several years (or decades) later.)
  • Arnt 4y ago
    The fact that money didn't necessarily reach people doing the work doesn't necessarily mean that you can't make vacuous statements. Name where that money was thrown around — if it was. Don't just name where it wasn't.
    • toyg 4y ago
      I already did: Novell paid $210m for SuSE, plus $50m they got from IBM. SuSE was always a key (if not the key) KDE "customer" and sponsor, beyond Trolltech. That was big money, back then.
      • hitekker 4y ago
        • Arnt 4y ago
          If that's about me, I was in bed asleep. You posted that at six in the morning, in my timezone. $210m is lowish price for a company with several hundred tech employees and a fine list of enterprise consulting customers. A friend who worked at Suse at the time described it as "a reasonable price for just the consulting division".
      • 4y ago
• arinlen 4y ago
  > KDE is one of the biggest softwares out there. It was the first SVN repository to reach 1 million commits, etc etc Doesn't KDE use a monorepo to store each and every project under the sun whose name starts with a K? I vaguely recalled from way way back that even the most basic of development tasks, such as building kmail, forced developers to checkout all other projects. This doesn't look like something to brag about.
  • emilsedgh 4y ago
    KDE was a big monorepo but SVN allowed partial checkouts.
• derefr 4y ago
  I feel like GNOME and KDE may have very different stories money-wise; as all the commercial "we'll sell you a support contract" players in the Linux space these days — meaning, in the last 20 years — ship GNOME-based distros.
  • smoldesu 4y ago
    Yep. While Red Hat doesn't "own" GNOME by any traditional definition, they definitely pay for a controlling stake in it's direction.
    • hulitu 4y ago
      SUN also shiped GNOME with Solaris so i imagine they also had some money invested there.
    • Crysstalis 4y ago
      There is no "pay for a controlling stake", they either send engineers to work on it or they don't. GNOME is not a corporation, you cannot buy stock in it.
      • smoldesu 4y ago
        That's more-or-less what I'm referring to. When you're dealing with a foundation that hasn't been bothered to fix decades-old issues in their software, sending engineers and paying for man-hours is exactly what gets things done. Since you're paying the engineers, you decide what they make. That gives you a considerable amount of control over the ecosystem, and explains how Linux users ended up in a development tug-of-war with enterprise patrons.
        • Crysstalis 4y ago
          That still does not give you any more control. Anyone can still change the project or fork it or do whatever, just they do not because only the engineers working on it are the ones who do get anything done. Anyway, the way to fix that would be to donate more to the foundation or to individual developers. In most open source projects, the non-profit foundation is not usually the primary source of engineers because they make a tiny amount of money compared to what the big enterprises do. But it is not very likely you will ever escape that tug-of-war, because developing an entire OS is very expensive.
• pas 4y ago
  so .. if there was no money why were KDE folk acting like Mozilla ppl? :o I mean when Plasma came around it was so full of bugs, the useless activity thing, etc, and bug repors were just ignored (or all the response was get HEAD and reproduce on it otherwise no one cares.)
  • vlunkr 4y ago
    This logic seems rather backwards. You think they weren’t addressing bugs because they had money?
    • pas 4y ago
      no, I mean the core KDE developer community acted like they were flush with money, users, etc.
  • emilsedgh 4y ago
    Well, the reason KDE 4.0 was to buggy was exactly "because" KDE had contributors. Porting from Qt3 to Qt4 was a lot of work. Some volunteers completed that much much earlier than others but had to wait for others parts of the project to ship. More complex parts weren't ready yet, and as such, some contributors were losing interest. So KDE had to ship it at some point to make sure the train keeps moving. It was a combination of the massive, massive hype train that was generated by KDE + distro's not listening to KDE's ask for 4.0 and earlier versions not being shipped that caused a massive backlash. KDE learned from the mistakes and the 4 to 5 transition and 5 to 6 transition which is in the works now are both avoiding those mistakes. But KDE did fix those bugs. Within a few releases, KDE 4 was quite usable and stable, but the damage was done. In my opinion KDE hasn't really recovered the bad image caused by that despite the fact that its in a much better position now.
    • mongol 4y ago
      It feels like an eternity now. I left KDE sole time after the KDE 4 release. Before that it felt quite polished. It never regained that polished feeling, as long as I followed it after KDE 4 released. But I hear it is good now, so perhaps it finally got it.
• giancarlostoro 4y ago
  > KDE is one of the biggest softwares out there. It was the first SVN repository to reach 1 million commits, etc etc and most of it has been volunteer work. Any claim that money was thrown at KDE really upsets me because it would be a complete mischaracterization of the nature of the project and motivations of people behind it. I think people also forget the core of KDE is Qt. I think when you think of how capable and powerful Qt is, it kind of makes sense that KDE can thrive the way it does, now I don't want to take away from KDE because no doubt they build their own things on top of Qt, but I would assume a lot of the complex heavy lifting is done by Qt in aggregate.