Saturday, August 24, 2019

The KDE Monastery

Posted: 8/24/2019

If you think that monasteries in the Western world are kind of quaint and only exist on the periphery of Western societies, where few citizens aspire to become a monk, you might be in for a rude shock.

I have recently discovered a modern monastery, where young people flock to in droves. It is called the Linux based KDE international free software community (S1). E.g. the KDE Plasma Desktop is the default desktop environment on many Linux distributions.

Since I have been using one of KDE’s products very heavily on a daily basis, i.e. Okular (a PDF file viewer & annotator), I thought it would be a good idea to share bug/feature reports about this product with the KDE community.

In dealing with the KDE community, I found out that they care more about themselves and their well being than about the users of their products or the quality of their products. Some of the volunteers have a lazy, cloistered, cultish, arrogant prima donna like attitude and they respond like snowflakes. Volunteer outsiders (like me) trying to contribute are not treated very well unless they adhere to the rules of the monastery. When I addressed my concerns with the KDE community, an administrator quickly shunted me and disabled my account. 

I also tried to contact by email the German registered association behind the KDE community, i.e. the KDE e.V. a registered non-profit organization that represents the KDE Community in legal and financial matters, but they never bothered to respond.

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