KDE-Forum.org

http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/01/talking-bluntly.html

It might have prevented me making a public spectacle of myself.

Ironically, if a spambot hadn't revived an old thread, I would have never seen it, This resolved all my anxieties about the future of KDE3, and answers a lot of concerns. This is what should have been offered in response to Mr Nichols' "It's time for a fork" article. This information should be on KDE's website, and not just on Aaron's blog. In lieu of that, I think that everybody who wants to heal the rift in the KDE community ought to circulate this. Link it, bookmark it, digg it, make it delicious, put it on your blogs.

Quoted

"This year, as with most years since KDE3 emerged, there have been huge deployments of KDE 3 based software. These deployments will not shift for years to come, no matter what KDE4 is. This is because large institutional deployments (government, corporate, educational, etc) typically have 3-7 year cycles (sometimes even longer) between major changes. Patches and security fixes? Sure. Major revamps? No. This alone ensures that KDE3 will remain supported for years. Why? Because there are users. That is how the open source dev model works: where there are users, there are developers; as one declines so does the other. The developers tend to be a step ahead of the users for software that is progressive, but you'll also find that they have a foot in the here and now too (as well as the past, often)."

This is why no fork is needed, not because KDE4 is all things to all people, but because KDE3 is alive and will be maintained as long as people use it. Want to keep using KDE3? Keep using KDE3. Doesn't sound like a problem to me. (Some people have complained because their bugfixes haven't gotten prompt attention and they're getting responses like "That has been fixed in KDE4". Maybe there needs to be some recourse. Maybe they should try just resubmitting.)