Just a short note. KDE team has released KDE 4.2 today. It’s their first release of KDE4 project they consider ready for public audience.
KDE4 is a fascinating project. It is a great topic for a book. Project that started when KDE started loosing ground inside Linux DE to Gnome, when KDE became less active, less motivated and somehow drown in lack of direction they managed to build a vision, action plan, set up a clear direction and follow it.
What’s even more amazing is that they followed it despite massive criticizm they had to face around KDE4.0 release.
The vision was, and still is, extremely challenging. It’s not about “updating to current standards”. It’s about setting up new ones. They do not “follow” Windows or MacOS. They experiment to the scale rarely seen in Open Source projects which tend to choose evolution over revolution usually.