Re: a little something worth noting . . .

begin  Navindra Umanee's  quote:

| Probably the only person active in the KDE League at that point was
| Andreas, fully overworked and poorly motivated.  So when you say
| KDE League in this context, really it means everything falling on
| the shoulders of one person.  And I can understand how the full
| responsibility of KDE promotion in America could end up being too
| much burden for one person.

i have heard this said, but i haven't seen anything to support it, 
because i haven't seen anything that that one person did, other than 
write emails to the editors of linux sites asking them not to link to 
stories on sites that he did not like, and otherwise trying to 
silence others. what overwork could there have been? particularly if 
somebody else was being paid to produce the news releases?

| Now, you're going to tell me that the KDE League failed if it all
| fell down to one overworked person and a conspicuous lack of money.

again, i see no evidence of there being overwork. i have seen, when 
developers asked what the kde league was doing, a response that he 
was too busy to say. but what he was too busy doing remains 
considerably less than obvious, because there's no evidence that the 
kde league ever did anything at all, beyond the one time they raised 
hell when ximian bought ad space on kde searches. that can't have 
taken much time or any money. oh, and from time andreas arranged 
interviews with andreas. also inexpensive as to either time or money. 
and until recently, the kde.org web page listed him as the u.s. press 
contact for kde, meaning that the confusion between kde and kde 
league was compounded -- and that to get kde information or an 
interview, anyone not intimate with the kde project would have to go 
through him.

| Actually, at the risk of diverging private information and getting
| myself into trouble, I believe that, no, much of these funds were
| *not* obtained.  I do believe this figure of $173,000 per year
| needs confirmation.

i agree. 

| Even before there was a KDE League, I recall we were paying quite
| huge sums to BW to get our press releases out.  I think the sums
| ranged from $1000-$2000 but I don't quite recall.  This money was
| obtained from various companies.
|
| The GNOME Foundation routinely issues press releases as well... 
| and invariably gets GNOME into the news as a result.  It would
| certainly be interesting to dig up how much they spend.

indeed it would. part of the problem, i think, is that from the 
beginning the kde league behaved in a strange, less-than-public 
fashion, including the denial that it was going to exist at all 
through artful use of weasel words. beyond that, though -- when was 
there ever a shortage of coverage of a kde release (software release, 
not news release)? i know of one case in which publications were 
written to in behalf of kde and actually asked *not* to cover a 
release until it could get propagated to the mirrors. and who was the 
recipient of these $3,000 news releases? because a release needs to 
comprise this:

1. there is a release

2. here are the new features.

3. here is where you can get it.

now. that's gonna be on the project's site, anyway, so all you need is 
a copy of that (or, hell, the url), and a mailing list of at most 150 
people at places likely to cover the appearance of a new kde. and 
this needs to be done, according to the schedule, four times a year. 
this is not difficult or espensive -- it takes a couple hours and 
whatever the cost of email is, which here, at least, is nothing.

| Yes, the whole KDE League situation is very sad.  I never made
| secret my feelings on the matter in the past.  I hope the new
| efforts succeed.

i agree, though i'm not sure what the purpose of the thing is, in that 
a project that can thrive as kde has with in effect no kde league can 
certainly do will with no kde league in fact. if the kde project 
wants to establish a fundraising arm to support the kde project, i 
think that's great, though i also think that making finances public 
is always better in an organization that seeks to be nonprofit. and 
if the kde project wants to establish some sort of auxiliary 
organization, i think it would be good to very specifically establish 
what it is to do, and for what ever money it uses to be drawn from 
kde e.v.; then, there can be no issue of one person deciding whether 
or not to be accountable, when "the board" needs to be consulted and 
when it does not ("the board" having been invoked in the refusal to 
describe what if anything the kde league had done, but i doubt that 
"the board" approved attempt to suppress stories, which happened on 
several occasions, with the effect that some publications came to 
think of the kde league as some kind of out-of-control nuthouse; in 
one case it actually led to a well-known site linking to a piece of 
which it had otherwise been unaware).
-- 
dep

http://www.linuxandmain.com -- outside the box, barely within
the envelope, and no animated paperclip anywhere.

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