End of the world? Finisterra in Galicia, Spain?
That's in the Northwest past of Spain, facing the Atlantic.
As you might guess, the currents and cliffs were so rough that the locals named the place "The end of the world" (Finis Terrae in Latin).
On KDE, the best for the project would be an inmutable distro with Flatpak.
No. Jonathan was co-maintaining KDE neon, which now has one developer left and is about to be joined by KDE Linux, another take on a Plasma-based distro. He also handled release manager duties, which have been transferred and running smoothly for a few months now.
He may have contributed in other ways that I'm not aware of, but overall KDE is in a very good spot with many more developers working on stuff.
KDE has done a great job keeping up a good desktop environment. They need to be careful not to let developers determine resource usage, as we got ksysguard replaced with an inferior System Monitor this way.
> But in the end I lost my friends, my colleagues, my job, my career and my family. What’s a spod who just tried to do the right thing for society to do?
I don't see enough people reflecting on this, much less in the open source community. Props to the author for being so honest about it.
HN has a culture that is very eager to promote passionate computing, and I still consider that good thing. At the same time though, we put an immense amount of faith in technology, that "fixing" a problem in code or hardware will make it go away. It's a great religion for motivated tech workers, but also still a passionate lie. There are so many extenuating things that determine success and define your problem space, it becomes almost wasteful to sacrifice your personal wellbeing to "fix" a problem and renew your faith in technology.
This happens everywhere, in startups and open source projects alike. Take care of yourselves, people.
Oof. I've had the experience of ex-colleagues, some of whom I thought had become friends, suddenly stopping all communication with me (In my case because I spoke up against mental and physical abuse against others). It hurt a lot. Hope surfing the wave helps.
I would encourage you to reach out the the friends you have worked with. Currently, this other person is controlling the narrative, and your friends may have been fed a very inaccurate view of what has happened.
Nate sounds like the kind of person to lie to your former colleagues about you; I'd suggest reaching out to them to tell them what happened. Staying silent is letting Nate win.
> It was the turn of the millenium when I got my first computer fresh at university. Windows seemed uninteresting, it was impossible to work out how it worked or write programs for it.
What? There were plenty of books out by Petzold, Richter and Prosise.
These are well-renowned books but I agree that it was hard to get started writing windows software. Win16 and Win32 were very strange APIs with a mixture of having to do things yourself, having the OS do it for you, and the OS calling you at unexpected times to get things done. WndProcs were re-entrant, because while you are handling WM_MOUSE you could get called by the OS to do a WM_PAINT. The whole architecture lends itself to spaghetti.
Or, you could use MFC, and then you just had to trust the library to do things right. Debugging your code wasn't easy because it would get lost in things that MFC was doing that you don't fully understand. A lot of the source code was available, however.
Or, you could use WTL, which was a third party library at the time that gave you a different way of doing it.
Debugging into/through Windows itself was really difficult due to the lack of source code. All you had were symbols and assembly. Because of how it worked, you could easily find memory corruption in your program because of some boneheaded thing you did, but finding the cause of it was hard because of its highly non-sequential nature.
Qt had a nicer approach with signals and slots, and used a more object-oriented way of building the software. Software was easier to understand. It also worked on Windows, but IIRC that part wasn't free. It is a long time since the late 90s so I am not sure about my memory. I enjoyed using Qt, though, and found it to be a much better programming model than straight Win32 or MFC. KDE was a great little system circa 2000, and it introduced the Konqueror browser that gave us the future we have today.
Anyhow, that is a lot to say that I understand how an intelligent person could read Petzold and still feel like a dummy. Writing Windows software in the late 90s/early 2000s was often humbling and there wasn't as much support from things like StackOverflow and the rest at the time.
It’s commendable to want to start a “cooperative socialist paradise”, you can pitch it and see if there’s interest with others. But it’s totally OK as well for others to not want to join that, and go the more conventional way.
It sounds like Nate is set on starting a conventional company, and that should be fine. The previous company apparently never made financial sense so it also doesn’t work to just continue that model directly and so things and people get cut. It can be both hard to communicate and to hear, doubly so when you’re emotionally invested. That’s why IMO it’s important to separate your self worth from your job at some level, for your own mental wellbeing.
We never had workers rights at Blue Systems, we were all on self employment contracts. This will continue at Tech Paladin. It is illegal but unenforceable when done on an international setup. But employment rights are not a luxury you can chose to do without if you enjoy your job and want some more flexibility in your work day. They are fundamental and life altering rights that change people’s lives as I discovered when my adopted children were taken away from me. Nobody should be doing business with or taking money from Tech Paladin else be party to illegal workers rights abuses.
So, first off, it seems like Jonathan Riddell not working on KDE anymore is a huge loss for the KDE community.
But I'm not sure I really understand what happened. AFAICT, Valve had a contract with Blue Systems, specifically a subunit of Blue Systems that does KDE development. Blue Systems decided to sell that subunit to Techpaladin, Nate Graham's company. Riddell was unhappy about this, and proposed that... I guess that Blue Systems not sell to Techpaladin? Or that Techpaladin reorganize itself into a worker-owned company? And then when Graham declined to do this, stuff happened, and eventually Riddell got fired from Techpaladin, or not hired by Techpaladin, and now Riddell is not getting paid to work on KDE. So Riddell has (not unreasonably) decided to stop working on KDE. And the other people who once worked for Blue Systems and now work for Techpaladin have decided to keep working for Techpaladin.
I got distracted by the Quaker thing and went down a rabbit hole. But overall Jonathan seems like a decent person and major loss to KDE. Only thing I'm confused about is why he got shunned and I guess he had issues with his family too. Just about anything could explain that so I feel like that's a critical piece here but I'm not looking to violate anyones privacy or force them to divulge such information. Just something that could explain where Jonathan is coming from in all this.
I read Nate's response and it seems very hand wavy. Regardless hope Jonathan can continue doing what he loves somewhere else.
> But in the end I lost my friends, my colleagues, my job, my career and my family.
As a Plasma user and a part of a KDE team for 10 years at some time (in the past), reading this really breaks my heart. I hope Jonathan can find peace and healing.
21 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 40.6 ms ] threadOn KDE, the best for the project would be an inmutable distro with Flatpak.
He may have contributed in other ways that I'm not aware of, but overall KDE is in a very good spot with many more developers working on stuff.
I don't see enough people reflecting on this, much less in the open source community. Props to the author for being so honest about it.
HN has a culture that is very eager to promote passionate computing, and I still consider that good thing. At the same time though, we put an immense amount of faith in technology, that "fixing" a problem in code or hardware will make it go away. It's a great religion for motivated tech workers, but also still a passionate lie. There are so many extenuating things that determine success and define your problem space, it becomes almost wasteful to sacrifice your personal wellbeing to "fix" a problem and renew your faith in technology.
This happens everywhere, in startups and open source projects alike. Take care of yourselves, people.
UPDATE: Apparently it was a deal done months ago with the Blue Systems owner: https://pointieststick.com/2025/03/10/personal-and-professio...
What? There were plenty of books out by Petzold, Richter and Prosise.
Or, you could use MFC, and then you just had to trust the library to do things right. Debugging your code wasn't easy because it would get lost in things that MFC was doing that you don't fully understand. A lot of the source code was available, however.
Or, you could use WTL, which was a third party library at the time that gave you a different way of doing it.
Debugging into/through Windows itself was really difficult due to the lack of source code. All you had were symbols and assembly. Because of how it worked, you could easily find memory corruption in your program because of some boneheaded thing you did, but finding the cause of it was hard because of its highly non-sequential nature.
Qt had a nicer approach with signals and slots, and used a more object-oriented way of building the software. Software was easier to understand. It also worked on Windows, but IIRC that part wasn't free. It is a long time since the late 90s so I am not sure about my memory. I enjoyed using Qt, though, and found it to be a much better programming model than straight Win32 or MFC. KDE was a great little system circa 2000, and it introduced the Konqueror browser that gave us the future we have today.
Anyhow, that is a lot to say that I understand how an intelligent person could read Petzold and still feel like a dummy. Writing Windows software in the late 90s/early 2000s was often humbling and there wasn't as much support from things like StackOverflow and the rest at the time.
It sounds like Nate is set on starting a conventional company, and that should be fine. The previous company apparently never made financial sense so it also doesn’t work to just continue that model directly and so things and people get cut. It can be both hard to communicate and to hear, doubly so when you’re emotionally invested. That’s why IMO it’s important to separate your self worth from your job at some level, for your own mental wellbeing.
We never had workers rights at Blue Systems, we were all on self employment contracts. This will continue at Tech Paladin. It is illegal but unenforceable when done on an international setup. But employment rights are not a luxury you can chose to do without if you enjoy your job and want some more flexibility in your work day. They are fundamental and life altering rights that change people’s lives as I discovered when my adopted children were taken away from me. Nobody should be doing business with or taking money from Tech Paladin else be party to illegal workers rights abuses.
But I'm not sure I really understand what happened. AFAICT, Valve had a contract with Blue Systems, specifically a subunit of Blue Systems that does KDE development. Blue Systems decided to sell that subunit to Techpaladin, Nate Graham's company. Riddell was unhappy about this, and proposed that... I guess that Blue Systems not sell to Techpaladin? Or that Techpaladin reorganize itself into a worker-owned company? And then when Graham declined to do this, stuff happened, and eventually Riddell got fired from Techpaladin, or not hired by Techpaladin, and now Riddell is not getting paid to work on KDE. So Riddell has (not unreasonably) decided to stop working on KDE. And the other people who once worked for Blue Systems and now work for Techpaladin have decided to keep working for Techpaladin.
Am I missing something? Being unfair to someone?
I read Nate's response and it seems very hand wavy. Regardless hope Jonathan can continue doing what he loves somewhere else.
As a Plasma user and a part of a KDE team for 10 years at some time (in the past), reading this really breaks my heart. I hope Jonathan can find peace and healing.