Qt Creator
Matthias Ettrich states that he found the reaction from the KDE Community ‘funny’. I’m pretty surprised by that.
Although I think the blogs about it were kind of depressing, but they are understandable. Whenever someone launches a piece of code that is a direct competitor to some code that is already existing, you simply should not expect cheerful people. If you start a nail studio, right next to an existing nail studio, don’t expect to get an invite for the usual coffee.
Having said that, I really don’t think the posted blogs reflect the opinion of the whole KDE Community. I think the reactions were mostly from people who care about KDevelop deeply.
Personally I never got the hang of KDevelop, so I’m happy that there is an alternative now. I’m sure I’m going to try it soonish and hopefully get out of my vi workflow. Although I believe CMake is not yet supported in Qt Creator, which is pretty crucial for a KDE developer (That’s options 5 in Matthias’ list, ‘I would like to use it if you implement X, Y an Z’).
I also think the responses weren’t that bad at all, and I’m sorry Matthias feels so bad about it. Sure, there were some flames and NIH accusations but as you say, that’s to be expected.
It would be a mistake to ignore the comments as pointless negativity. As a psychologist, I know people CAN be pointlessly negative, but in pretty much all cases, there IS an underlying reason. And it’s often a good reason. Hmmmmm.
I wrote a huge blog about it at first, but removed it and kept it short… Maybe I should try again ;-)
Indeed funny that Matthias think it’s funny. The issue is really about trust which again is best served by openness (making software open source at some point isn’t enough, especially not when that point is in the future). Qt and Trolltech back in the days got trust since both sides were rather small groups which were capable of communication on a personal level without much overhead (it’s how Matthias got there to begin with after all). Once the trust of KDE members in Qt wasn’t sufficient anymore Trolltech gradually adapted through the KDE Free Qt Foundation as well as putting the different Qt versions under widely accepted Free Software licenses. One negative point of Qt, the mainly non-open development and handling of bugs and issues, was softened by the regular availability of source updates coupled with the possibility of having patches in KDE’s SVN/CVS.
Qt Creator on the other hand was completely done in the dark until the obscure “Greenhouse” announcement. Aaron Seigo writes “I’ve known for a couple years that this was happening”. So even if that hasn’t been a top down development and wasn’t willfully done “against” KDevelop, the pure fact that a so far closed source project with several years of development and no prior communicated history hits a Free Software community like an alien just can’t entice everyone to trust it right away. That trust is earned, doing this is usually the harder the later one starts.
Fitting that Matthias has comments closed on his blog entry (even though at the Trolltech website they are moderated anyway afaik). I think he is burned out from reading the comments on the dot and telling everyone his point of view. It should be obvious why he was lost on Derek Kite.
I used to use KDevelop long ago. Back then it was just a basic VC6 style IDE not much different than QDevelop is today. But I gradually drifted away to Xemacs/Konsole as my IDE. So I don’t really have deep ties to it. I think all these people accusing Matthias of apostasy need to adjust their medication schedule.
Hi Tom,
Nobody from KDevelop has told anything bad about trolls doing new software. Competition is a cool thing that makes software better. We just discussed what should we do to be enough competitive to the new challenge :) KDevelop4 rocks and ready to fight to become well-known best C++ IDE.
Btw, check KDevelop mentor’s blog.
I think the reception was quite good. The sentence “the worst feedback came from the KDE community” is really exaggerated I think. Negative opinions always get expressed more frequently than positive ones, you can see that nearly everywhere, especially on community critics sites (e.g. for Restaurants, Hotels, Products, etc.). The dot also seems to be the number one attraction point for trolls and embittered people. But even on the dot, I didn’t see too many completely bad comments. It seems to me that Matthias is a bit offended by the NIH claims, although they are mostly pointless. I hope he doesn’t mistake it as a general opinion of the community.