getting our world perspectives straight here

so Luis Villa, a prominent member of the GNOME project, wrote a blog entry today wondering why kde gets so much press attention. i'm not really going to address that issue (maybe some other time) but it did get me thinking about things..

first, Luis lists a bunch of metrics by which, in his mind, one can say thir project is popular. primarily it came down to listing companies interest in GNOME and something about deployments. then he says:

and they (KDE) have Linspire

that's it. that's his whole list. he did have Intel there but then scratched it out later. what i'm curious about is whether Luis and his fellow project members (and perhaps the general population?) are really so ignorant of KDE's partners that he could only list "Linspire"?

KDE works with and is invested in by the likes of Trolltech, SUSE/Novell and Mandriva. we also have received help from IBM, HP, Intel and other big names. if we start lining up the likes of NoMachine, Xandros and Linspire the list gets quite long. and when Luis says that they have "a thriving environment of small professional developers", which i'm sure they do, i immediately think of KDE's KDAB, Intevation, erfrakon, the OpenUsability folks, SourcExtreme, Staikos Computing, Danka, credativ, theKompany, myself and on and on. it's more than a little annoying to have a large and varied industry around KDE only to have it repeatedly dismissed as non-existent by those who ought to be our closest allies. this has to be frustrating not just for us within the project, but also for those who are in that group of KDE's supporting players.

we evidently need to do a better job of documenting and publicizing our industry involvement. here's a task: see if you can find the page that lists our sponsors on the kde project website. and when was the last time we talked about those people publicly?

edit: stephan binner reminded me to mention the KDE::Enterprise business directory. this is indeed a good starting point.

i also think it's interesting that when the city of Vienna moves to KDE and linux, the pr around it continuously fails to mention KDE. we need to somehow do a better job of letting the world know that these deployments are using our work.

but you know ... there's more to do here than compare schlong lengths as measured by industry involvement and what not. what we need to remember is that we shouldn't be clambering over each other to see who can beat the other; we're much better served these days by promoting our brands in a harmonious way. the real target is not each other but the 90%+ share of the desktop market currently held by microsoft windows. sometimes we waste far too much effort being concerned about comparing our couple of percent to their couple of percent.

this leads us to doing things like unnecessarily excluding each other from events and opportunities and even publicly trivializing each other as Luis did today. and then we turn around and expect, at times even demand, that our developers work together towards common standards and technologies. i have a very long blog about something that happened in this vein this past weekend that i'm sitting on at the moment, actually.

in any case, it seems that our combined public relations and development organs sometimes seem to be working to different ends and on different wavelengths here. that's not healthy because our developers, users and the general market watch and are influenced by these things. i can only help manage the kde end of these things along with the numerous others who do tremendously positive work for kde in these matters, and that's really just half the solution. it's up to GNOME to manage their end responsibly to provide the other half.

of course, maybe that's why KDE gets more mainstream attention.