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History
See also: History of free software#Desktop
Origins
KDE was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich, who was then a student at the Eberhard Karls University of Tbingen. At the time, he was troubled by certain aspects of the Unix desktop. Among his qualms was that none of the applications looked, felt, or worked alike. He proposed the formation of not only a set of applications, but rather a desktop environment, in which users could expect things to look, feel, and work consistently. He also wanted to make this desktop easy to use; one of his complaints with desktop applications of the time was that his girlfriend could not use them. His initial Usenet post spurred a lot of interest, and the KDE project was born.
The name KDE was intended as a word play on the existing Common Desktop Environment, available for Unix systems. CDE was an X11-based user environment jointly developed by HP, IBM, and Sun, through the X/Open Company, with an interface and productivity tools based on the Motif graphical widget toolkit. It was supposed to be an intuitively easy-to-use desktop computer environment. The K was originally suggested to stand for “Kool”, but it was quickly decided that the K should stand for nothing in particular. Additionally, one of the tips in certain versions of KDE 3 incorrectly states that the K currently is just meant to be the letter before L in the Latin alphabet, the first letter in the word Linux (which is where KDE is usually run).. In 2009 it was decided that KDE should no longer be an acronym at all, the decision comes after the ports to Windows and OS X and popular applications such as Amarok which meant KDE was no longer just a desktop , socket 478 cpus .
Matthias Ettrich chose to use the Qt toolkit for the KDE project. Other programmers quickly started developing KDE/Qt applications, and by early 1997, a few applications were being released , mitsubishi rosa bus .
First series
KDE 1.0
On 12 July 1998 KDE 1.0 was released. In the release announcement the KDE team outlined the project and its reasons for creation:
KDE is a network transparent, contemporary desktop environment for UNIX workstations. KDE seeks to fill the need for an easy to use desktop for Unix workstations, similar to the desktop environments found under the MacOS or Window95/NT. We believe that the UNIX operating system is the best operating system available today. In fact UNIX has been the undisputed choice of the information technology professional for many years. When it comes to stability, scalability and openness there is no competition to UNIX. However, the lack of an easy to use contemporary desktop environment for UNIX has prevented UNIX from finding its way onto the desktops of the typical computer user in offices and homes.
With KDE there is now an easy to use, contemporary desktop environment available for UNIX. Together with a free implementation of UNIX such as Linux, UNIX/KDE constitutes a completely free and open computing platform available to anyone free of charge including its source code for anyone to modify. While there will always be room for improvement we believe to have delivered a viable alternative to some of the more commonly found and commercial operating systems/desktops combinations available today. It is our hope that the combination UNIX/KDE will finally bring open, reliable, stable and monopoly free computing to the average computer.
DE 1.0 Release Announcement
In November 1998, the Qt toolkit was dual-licensed under the free/open source Q Public License (QPL) & a commercial-license for proprietary software developers. The same year, the KDE Free Qt foundation was created which guarantees that Qt would fall under a variant of the very liberal BSD license should Trolltech cease to exist or no free/open source version of Qt be released during 12 months. Debate continued about compatibility with the GNU General Public License (GPL), so in September 2000, Trolltech made the Unix version of the Qt libraries available under the GPL, in addition to the QPL, which eliminated the concerns of the Free Software Foundation. Trolltech continued to require licenses for developing proprietary software with Qt. The core libraries of KDE are collectively licensed under the GNU LGPL, but the only way for commercial software to make use of them was to be developed under the terms of the Qt commercial license.
Second and third series
KDE 2.0
The second series of releases, KDE 2, introduced significant technological improvements. These included DCOP (Desktop COmmunication Protocol), KIO, an application I/O library, KParts, a component object model, allowing an application to embed another within itself, and KHTML, an HTML rendering and drawing engine.
KDE 3.2 with Konqueror and the About screen. This has been described as a watershed release.
The third series was much larger than the previous series, consisting of six major releases. The API changes between KDE 2 and KDE 3 were comparatively minor, meaning that the KDE 3 can be seen as largely a continuation of the KDE 2 series. All releases of KDE 3 were built upon Qt 3, which was only released under the GPL for Linux and Unix-like operating systems, including Mac OS X. For that reason, KDE 3 was only available on Windows through ports involving an X server.
Fourth series
KDE 4.0 with Dolphin and System Settings
KDE 4 is based on Qt 4 which is also released under the GPL for Windows and Mac OS X. Therefore KDE 4 applications can be compiled and run natively on these operating systems as well.
KDE 4 includes many new technologies and technical changes. The centerpiece is a redesigned desktop and panels collectively called Plasma which replaces Kicker, KDesktop, and SuperKaramba by integrating their functionality into one piece of technology, and is intended to be more configurable for those wanting to update the decades-old desktop metaphor. There are a number of new frameworks, including Phonon, a new multimedia interface making KDE independent of any one specific media backend, Solid, an API for network and portable devices, and Decibel, a new communication framework to integrate all communication protocols into the desktop. Also featured is a metadata and search framework, incorporating Strigi as a full-text file indexing service, and NEPOMUK with KDE integration.
The release of KDE 4.0 was met with a mixed reception. While early adopters were tolerant of the lack of finish for some of its new features, the release was widely criticised because of a lack of stability and its “beta” quality. Many expected it to be an upgrade of KDE 3.5, when in fact features regressed due to its extensive changes - some of which are still works in progress. The criticism has emerged in spite of the environment being labelled as non-final in distributions such as openSUSE. On the other hand favourable reviews praised KDE 4.0 for its revolutionary changes. By the 4.2 release KDE 4 had nearly approached feature parity with KDE 3.5.[citation needed] The release was generally well received according to Thom Holwerda.
Starting with Qt 4.5, Qt was also made available under the LGPL version 2.1, a major step for KDE adoption in corporate and commercial environments. This allows KDE to better compete with GNOME, Xfce and EDE which use toolkits licensed under the LGPL, because the LGPL permits proprietary/closed source applications to link to libraries licensed under the LGPL.
Organization
Like many free/open source software projects, KDE is primarily a volunteer effort, although various companies, such as Novell (in the form of SuSE), Qt Software, and Mandriva, employ developers to work on the project. Since a large number of individuals contribute to KDE in various ways (e.g. code, translation, artwork), organization of such a project is complex. Most problems are discussed on a number of different mailing lists. Important decisions, such as release dates and inclusion of new applications, are made on the kde-core-devel list by core developers. These are developers who have made significant contributions to KDE over a long period of time. Decisions are made by outcomes of democratic voting procedures. In most cases this seems to work well, and major debates (such as the question of whether the KDE 2 API should be broken in favour of KDE 3) are rare.
The KDE project and related events are frequently sponsored by individuals, universities, and businesses. On 15 October 2006, it was announced that Mark Shuttleworth had become the first patron of KDE, the highest level of sponsorship available. On 2007-07-07, it was announced that Intel Corporation and Novell had also become patrons of KDE.
While developers and users are now located all over the world, the project retains a strong base in Germany. The web servers are located at the universities of Tbingen and Kaiserslautern, a German non-profit organization (KDE e.V.) owns the trademark on KDE and KDE conferences often take place in Germany.
Identity
Konqi, mascot of the KDE project
Kandalf the wizard
Many KDE applications have a K in the name, mostly as an initial letter and capitalized. However, there are notable exceptions like kynaptic, whose K is not capitalized, and Amarok (formerly named amaroK). The K in many KDE applications is obtained by spelling a word which originally begins with C or Q differently, for example Konsole and Kuickshow. Also, some just prefix a commonly used word with a K, for instance KOffice. Among KDE 4 applications and technologies, however, the trend is not to have a K in the name at all, such as Plasma, Phonon and Dolphin.
The KDE…
