If practice makes perfect, I may yet be the best blogger ever.

I’m just responding to a few posts I saw on Planet KDE.

First off, a KDE contributor has joined the military (U.S. Army) and was offering his thoughts. Since I have already joined the U. S. Navy I thought I’d offer some (public) advice.

First off, the Voltaire quote he paraphrased wasn’t actually said by Voltaire (although he said something similar in meaning). But it’s “public knowledge” now so don’t fault Aaron for that, I just wanted to clarify. See the Wikipedia entry for more information.

Also, although I suppose it may be different for enlisted members of the military (especially those that aren’t actually in yet), it’s not the best idea to be discussing pretty much anything political on a very public forum. Especially when discussions turn to the current Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Services. Of course, I’m not a lawyer, etc. etc. etc.

I would like to point out to those giving him grief that attacking members of the military does nothing to help your cause. It is the civilian leadership that holds power over little questions such as invading sovereign nations over possibly misleading or trumped-up evidence, or spreading Reserve and National Guard units around the world so that they won’t be available to provide assistance to their home states in times of crisis. I don’t know how it works in other countries but here in America the military is rather strictly under the control of the civilian leadership. This is a good thing, trust me, but this means that your average grunt is as powerless to change military policy as a civilian. The military will exist no matter what anyways, so would you rather have those who are driven by the desire to help and defend their country in the Army, or those who would rather spread destruction across the world?

I also wanted to reply to Tom Chance’s concerns over KDE naming. He says that if KDE adopts a term for applications that are shipped by KDE in addition to the base libraries for development, that 3rd party developers would also adopt the term and render it useless. But you could apply this reasoning to any of a similar set of situations. I don’t want to go too far into it but it basically implies the kind of malicious intent that is always brought up when discussion sites like Wikipedia but which never seems to actually materialize.

Tom does make a good point that to use a term for KDE’s own applications, there should be a set of guidelines that such apps would have to follow, which would have to be public and have requirements that applications would have to meet. Tom brings this up as if it were an issue, but it’s actually a great idea, and as far as I know we’re already on the way to doing things of this nature. Those who read the kde-core-devel archives will notice that it is becoming harder and harder to say “Hey, I’ve got this great app which I think KDE should ship!”, as more and more is required of applications hoping to make it. I think it would be great to codify what we expect KDE’s applications to support as a minimum base for KDE 4, and either fix apps that aren’t up to spec or boot them out when we do the release.

Also, he’s concerned about the fact that there may be confusion when people say they have a KDE application as to whether they are talking about an application for KDE libraries, or an application by KDE the project. But, Aaron Seigo’s proposal has already taken care of the latter argument. Although I think a better name suggestion is in order, so I’ll throw out a few. First let me note that I don’t want a proposed name to start with a K. Tom already mentioned that if we used Kaleidos as the name, then we could refer to KDE as the Kaleidos Desktop Environment. But it’s not that, it’s just KDE, but why should people think different if we lump our applications under Kaleidos or any other name that begins with a K?

Personally I’d like such a name to be generic as well, and relatively short. Right now I’m leaning towards astronomical names like Terra or Neptune. But I’m not sure if either is used in the computer field. Oh well, I guess it’s good that I don’t get paid to think of names. :)

Note that I’m not unreceptive to Tom’s suggestion that we just leave things alone and pound in the meaning that a KDE application is one built by anyone using KDE libraries. But if this is a confusing issue to people, then Aaron’s idea of naming the kde.org application set makes a lot of sense, and I don’t think it will suffer from the issues that Tom posits.