4 ms·
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 the
by 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 agoThe 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 agoI 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 agoIf 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".
- ognarb 4y agoAnd just after SuSE was brought almost all the KDE dev working at SuSE got fired.
- Arnt 4y agoA friend who worked at Suse at the time described Novell's price as a fair price for just the consulting division plus nothing for the rest. I don't remember that $50m or what it paid for.
- mongol 4y agoJust some companies I remember: Eazel. Ximian.
- jahewson 4y agoMicrosoft purchased Nokia’s mobile division in 2013 for $7bn.
- ognarb 4y agoAnd afterwards sold Qt and stopped financially supporting Calligra (the office suite). None of that money went to KDE, it just made the small cash flow towards KDE completely stop.