Re: Inspiration

On Wednesday 15 September 2010 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> 
> ok, enough nutjob rambling from me. to turn the question back to you
> Cornelius: what's the Why for you?

I still owe you an answer, so here you go:

We believe that everyone should have access to great technology. We believe 
that access to great, beautiful, elegant technology shouldn't require special 
skills, being part of a special group, contracting with a specific company, or 
being restricted by financial means. We do what we do, because we want to give 
everybody access to great technology.

How do we do it?

We do it by creating free software. Software is flexible, and can easily be 
made available to many, many people. Free software comes with the freedoms to 
actually do this, and guarantees, that people retain these freedoms, that 
their access to free software is ensured independent of questions of money or 
companies doing what they need. Free software also guarantees that people can 
improve it, can share it, and jointly make it better. So that a world-wide 
community of people sharing the believe to make software great and to make it 
available to the world, can work together towards this goal.

We do it by creating software for end users. User-facing software, which 
directly deals with providing access to technology to everybody, which makes 
it easy to deal with otherwise complex systems, which provides simple and 
effective ways to deal with computers and all the tasks done by computers.

We do it by enabling a huge group of capable people to create free software 
for end users. We create a platform, which makes it easy to create free 
software. We create components, which can be shared to make great 
applications. We create infrastructure, which provides the means to make our 
software accessible to everyone.

Last but not least we do it by being a community of passionate people sharing 
the goal of great software accessible to everyone. Our community in itself is 
the living concept of being accessible to everyone, creating great technology, 
and bringing together many committed people who share this purpose.

Looking at what we do there are tons of examples, which result from this why 
and how.

The original vision of KDE was to give Matthias' girlfriend a nice and easy 
way to use Linux, great technology, which he wanted to make accessible not 
only to technical enthusiast, but to a much broader group of people. To 
accomplish this goal he chose a piece of great technology, Qt, which was built 
to create great end-user software, accessible to everyone. This still is valid 
and has fueled tons of developers, who work on making all the details of this 
vision become reality.

Translators use KDE to make software accessible in all kind of languages, to 
make it accessible to the huge number of people who want or need to operate 
computers in their own language. This even includes languages, which are only 
secondary languages, only spoken by few people, or are in danger to die, but 
which are dear to the people who speak them.

If you look at what software we create, a lot of effort goes into making 
creating KDE software itself accessible. KDevelop was one of the first KDE 
applications, and it makes creating KDE software accessible to a wider 
audience. Also with our infrastructure, source code repositories, commit 
rights, bug tracker, mailing lists, etc. we go the direction of using great 
technology on one hand, and making it accessible to as many people as possible 
on the other hand.

There also is a strong focus on software, which enables people to join the 
community, to interact with other people, to put down barriers. A web browser 
to access the world wide web was one of the first KDE applications, there is a 
rich set of communication applications, email, instant messaging, etc. Lots of 
small and bigger parts of a platform, which enables people to share, to 
create, and use great software.

Then if you look for example at kde-apps.org, that's another awesome way to 
share great software, to give people access to technology, very low barrier, 
very inclusive, targeted at everybody, with room for people to contribute, to 
improve, and join. KDE software is not only about solving technical problems, 
but it's also about sharing with everybody, and doing software for everybody, 
and give everybody access to it. KDE also is not only about finding some 
solution, but finding a great solution in terms of technology. 

For me one of the happiest aspects of KDE is that as a user I get access to 
fantastic software, which covers most of what I can think of I could need or 
like to use, without strings attached, and on top of that that as a developer 
I get access to fill the gaps, which are still there, again without strings 
attached. You need software for something? Go find it in the universe of KDE 
software, and if it's not there add it yourself.

I could go on with this for a while, there are so many more examples, and I 
should probably have provided some more concrete details to illustrate it, but 
it's already long enough, so I'll stop here.

So that's my why. It puts a bit of a different perspective on the freedom 
aspect, because I feel that it's more of a means than a purpose in itself. 
It's a very effective means, but KDE is pragmatic and sometimes values great 
technology or access to everybody over a strict view of freedom, like it was 
with choosing Qt as toolkit in the very beginning, or like it was with porting 
KDE to Windows, and there are probably a few other examples. In the end all 
serves the purpose to get together to create awesome technology for everybody 
in the world.

-- 
Cornelius Schumacher <[email protected]>
 
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