The big fuss this week was the exclusion of QT, and and by extension, KDE from UserLinux. The main reason being that QT is licenced under the GPL, with the option of a closed source license for proprietary development. So with a stroke, about half of the desktop developers are excluded from an initiative that among other things targets the enterprise desktop. I believe that this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the economics of free and open source software. What is the scarce resource? Is it customers and users? I don't think so. The value proposition in FOSS is so good, customers will come. The scarce resources are developers. One wonders at the wisdom of pissing off half of your most valuable resource.

Paradoxically, this situation will incite many to code. Peter Rockai committed two Debian focused projects, both of which have goals of simplifying the configuration of KDE for Debian users. One is a DebConf front end, the other an Apt front end. Zack Rusin extended KConfEdit, adding the capability of configuring KDE over the network. No, neither KDE or Gnome are going away soon.

One year ago the 3.1 release was postponed till January for security fixes. Konstruct appeared, quickly becoming indispensable, and the KWin rewrite was started.