Say Hello To The "KDE Leaks" Team

[Fuchs]

Those that have taken fault with Phoronix articles haven't bothered providing notification of corrections

Well, to me it is not really their responsibility to do so, it is rather yours to get things correctly in the first place. I think that this is part of the job for someone who wants to write about Linux stuff in a journalistic manner. If you prefer quantity over quality and think that people should inform you and correct misinformation you spread, then phoronix gets down to the level of a gossip site, and can hardly be considered serious news.

Now if this would happen rarely or every now and then: okay, people do make mistakes. But it seems to me that a G+ or forum entry points at a phoronix mistake at least twice a month. And as an external person not using phoronix that often, this certainly doesn't give me a good impression. So you might want to work on that.

Kind regards,

Fuchs

[Rich Oliver]

I'm totally confused. I read the original article. I understood that Baloo is replacing Nepomuk in KDE, is this not the case?

[TheBlackCat]

I'm totally confused. I read the original article. I understood that Baloo is replacing Nepomuk in KDE, is this not the case?

Yes and no. Some parts of Baloo are new, others are taken from Nepomuk. It is a major change, but does not completely restart from scratch. The developers took what they learned from Nepomuk, replaced some bits that weren't working, kept other bits that were, and changed others that were in-between.

But the bigger problem with the article was that it claimed that KDE's Nepomuk was built using a $17 million grant from the EU, which would mean KDE wasted a huge amount of money. This is simply false. The EU gave a grant to a group totally unrelated to KDE to develop the Nepomuk RDF system. KDE and several other groups then made their own RDF systems based on the results of that research. KDE never saw a single dime of that money. What is more, the original, EU-funded Nepomuk implementation is still being used elsewhere. But if you look at the threat, you will see a lot of people now falsely think KDE wasted $17 million.

This is an extremely basic mistake, heck just a glance at wikipedia would have told Michael that he was making a mistake. But he is much more concerned with being first than being correct, and apparently couldn't care less what damage his misinformation does to the software communities he is reporting on.

[GreatEmerald]

I'm still confused about this article, but I guess TheBlackCat's explanation is a fairly good one.

[TheBlackCat]

I'm still confused about this article, but I guess TheBlackCat's explanation is a fairly good one.

That is the problem. It wasn't that the KDE development community are trying to nefariously keep things a secret(if they were it wouldn't have been on a public mailing list) or somehow cover up their changes (hard to do on a public git server). This is a somewhat complicated subject, and they wanted to figure out a way to explain it in a way that people could understand.

Now they not only have to explain what really is happening, they have to deal with the misinformation from here.

[yonux]

Hahahaha, for my point of view (European) this article is :
- 50% not understandable (English is not my mother tongue)
- confirmed me into my choice : never use KDE or Gnome as long as there is fights into their dev teams

By the way, Xfce works pretty well and fast, why bother with others desktop manager ?

[Awesomeness]

The main developer of Nepomuk and Baloo (Vishesh Handa) is against that idea, so are most other KDE contributors but they are not part of the promo team so they do not decide.

What a load of BS. The maintainer can always decide the name of his software unless it's legally forbidden.

I also find it ironic that people are accusing KDE of having closed-doors discussions on a public mailing list.

OTOH same is true for some KDE devs: They bitch that "private" discussions are posted on Phoronix. Instead of bitching, they should rather point the finger at themselves why the Baloo article for KDE News takes so long. It's basically done since weeks.

[lelele]

Hahahaha, for my point of view (European) this article is :
- 50% not understandable (English is not my mother tongue)
- confirmed me into my choice : never use KDE or Gnome as long as there is fights into their dev teams

By the way, Xfce works pretty well and fast, why bother with others desktop manager ?

Well, for one, I can't get xfce's session manager to work right for me. Keeps starting double docks and leaving trash usb folders.
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Wow, I never knew the Linux community could be so political. Given all the good things I've been told about FSF, I pictured it all to be rainbows and butterflies. It's just the same everywhere you go, isn't it?

[TheBlackCat]

OTOH same is true for some KDE devs: They bitch that "private" discussions are posted on Phoronix. Instead of bitching, they should rather point the finger at themselves why the Baloo article for KDE News takes so long. It's basically done since weeks.

Again, if the Phoronix article was actually accurate, none of this would have been an issue.

The whole reason the article took so long is because they had to worry about Phoronix in particular misrepresenting what they were doing. This was a concern from the moment the potential for a name change was brought up.

[edgar_wibeau]

It's just the same everywhere you go, isn't it?

Of course, as it's the same bell curve of stupidity in any crowd. No problem to me.