KDE Founder Receives Highest German Honor 142
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Soulskill
from the other-than-beer dept.
from the other-than-beer dept.
Jiilik Oiolosse writes "KDE founder Matthias Ettrich was decorated today with the German Federal Cross of Merit for his contributions to Free Software. The Federal Cross of Merit is both the most prestigious as well as the only general decoration awarded by the Federal Republic of Germany. It is awarded by the Federal President for outstanding achievements in the political, economic, cultural, and other fields. Matthias was awarded the medal in recognition of his work spurring innovation and spreading knowledge for the common good."
Re:Ha (Score:5, Insightful)
Take THAT gnome!
Except if it wasn't for GNOME Qt would still be proprietary. It's easy to neglect the impacts OSS projects have on eachother, even if they don't share one single row of code.
It stands to reason (Score:1, Insightful)
If this is the only general award given by the German government that it is also the least prestigious, too?
Well, there ARE different classes of the Cross (Score:1, Insightful)
He, and many others, deserve it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:not that happy (Score:4, Insightful)
There was a real choice of FOSS toolkits back then?
Congratulations Matthias (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot humor aside for a moment, it's truly a great honour to be recognized by one's country, and Matthias ought to be proud of the accomplishments of himself and the KDE community.
Keep up the good work Matthias and all the KDE folks. You deserve this, and your efforts are appreciated (though sorry, slashdot doesn't give out Crosses of Merit, yet)
Wow, the culture must be very different from U.S. (Score:3, Insightful)
Kind of ironic, given, umm, World War II and stuff, which country seems more free now.
But that represents such a freer mindset than exists in the USA. I can't imagine in my wildest dreams the highest national medal of the US going to a libre software person. It would take Linus Torvalds being elected our President ... and even then, he'd have no way to push this past Congress.
Re:not that happy (Score:2, Insightful)
And KDE's pick of a non-FOSS toolkit to build on was a grave error that could have done enormous damage.
Its' lack of Stallman's approval has enormously harmed KDE's degree of uptake and use, yes.
I continue to pray for the end of the Free Software Foundation. If Stallman and its' other members truly wanted to help their fellow man at this point, they would voluntarily dissolve the organisation, and withdraw into anonymity.
Re:not that happy (Score:3, Insightful)
KDE was founded by open sourcers, not free software evangelists, as such, it was founded on a pragmatic base. Qt was one of the best GUI toolkits at the time and KDE got a free-as-in-beer deal to use it, the devs acknowledged that the whole wasn't open but (shock, horror) they thought producing a working Desktop Environment to be more important then rewriting Qt from scratch (that was on a roadmap I believe, but it was low priority). GNOME came into existence by the Free Software people who couldn't bare having proprietary code touching their hardware, not exactly the most compelling reason to start a DE project.
As for the snipe about languages... What do you propose, Python? Ruby? (Ignoring the fact that neither existed in a usable form) Perl? People always bitch about C++ but that language is ultimately as messy or clean as you make it (Don't do stupid crap, use simpler constructs when they're good enough), although I suspect you also think not having to declare variables before you use them is a good idea (blech — almost the definition of write-once-read-never code). I'm not going to criticise GNOME's choice of C either, the more off putting thing is the absurd superiority complexes that the coders often seem to have despite the code being longer and often more complicated than the C++/other equivalent (without being faster either). The real crime on their part is GLib GObject, it's object-oriented C and is more ugly then Satan's backside — if you're going to use C then use C, don't half-ass C++ features into it.
Re:not that happy (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, one of them is. (It's the one with the OO strap-on, of course.) High-level programming needn't necessarily be LISP, but can at least be less sucky than C++.
C, OTOH, is a perfectly good systems language; I'm with you there. He is a fucking retard.
Re:He deserves it more than Obama / Gore do. (Score:4, Insightful)
And, I'm not saying that just because I happen to be a Republican...
This is true. Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize was an absolute farce, and you could tell that he knew that himself.
I don't view Obama as a monster, but he is no saviour, and no Messiah either.
Will Gnome 3 link to Mono? (Score:4, Insightful)
and we have all seen what happened to that GNU created hero (!) after he went to Novell. Do you really want to raise this "proprietary" crap for sure? Even GNU Debian Linux (there is a reason for that name) got infected by his wannabe framework (!) because of some trivial note taking application.
Now multi billion mobile/services giant Nokia, who doesn't need money like poor Trolltech has made the project free/GPL. I don't see any "Qt is proprietary" trolls cheering. It was so wrong to ask for money while companies making millions/billions with your full fledged framework isn't it? For example, Google, Adobe, Last.fm doesn't need to pay?
GNU's biggest mistake was making that trojan guy a hero while he didn't deserve it. He was just another person, a MS reject who did 1000th clone of Norton Commander, that is all.
Re:For me, there are no Big *Two.* (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It is the least prestigious.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, it is the "least prestigious" form of the "most prestigious" decoration. There are several classes of the Cross of Merit [wikipedia.org] and from the picture it looks like he was awarded the "Medal of Merit", i.e. the lowest one.
It is the lowest class - but the lower classes are way more prestigious, since the highest classes are only awarded to politicians and their personal friends (rather than people of merit)...