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I'm somewhat nervous about posting this due to its somewhat sensitive nature, but I'd like to share my own experiences with Indian programming students, and perhaps some of you who are more familiar with the education system in the country could provide some background info for me. As in, the following is definitely not meant to be any sort of judgement, because I'm relatively clueless and there is significant selection bias to the data my perspective affords.

I'm involved with programming mentoring program in a large open source community, KDE. A significant percentage of the mentoring requests I receive, I'd say about half of them, are by Indian CS students, often in their second or third year of college education. On average, they share the following attributes:

* They're nice and polite people, and, a sometimes significant language barrier aside, nice to work with.

* Unfortunately, their education level as pertaining to the programming practice tends to be far below that of Western students who have spent a similar amount of time in CS college education. They've had, say, C++ classes, but their understanding even of OOP basics tends to be lacking, not to mention groking something like an event loop. This is not necessarily a fatal problem considering that receiving programming mentoring is the point of the mentoring program, but we don't quite have the resources to make up for it all -- the idea is more to focus on helping with KDE specifics than general…

He's comparing KDE and Gnome core components (window management) and the linux kernel with developing iPhone apps. That's a bad comparaison in my opinion. Hacking on an operating system kernel or a window manager requires great skills that most kids (and adult devs) do not have.

A fair comparison would be iPhone apps Vs KDE or Gnome apps. And here KDE and Gnome get tons of new contributers each months, check how active is http://kde-apps.org for example, or the Ubuntu developer activities. Tasks that require less skills will always attract more developers or cooks or whatever in all professions.

Here's a Graph of KDE contributers http://dot.kde.org/2009/07/14/growth-metrics-kde-contributors up to July 2009. As a KDE dev that follows the mailing list, I can tell you the list of contributers is still groing well. Not to mention all the people that build KDE apps without being official KDE devs.

You're right. Ubuntu warty shipped with libqt3. However if you remember back when, there was still an axe hanging over the KDE team in the form of Trolltech. The fear was that if Qt free stopped existing one day (or if Trolltech wanted to stop licensing as GPL), the community would be up a creek.

The clarifying agreement: (https://dot.kde.org/2004/07/24/trolltech-and-kde-free-qt-foundation-announce-updated-agreement) finally fixed things in a way to where if Trolltech got bought out or stopped releasing the free version, it would immediately become BSD licensed. This agreement still exists to day as far as I know.

As far as I remember discussions going back then, people did not trust Trolltech much, and knew the license situation was "weird" - even after the GPL licensing. I don't have anything I can cite specifically, only old discussions that I vaguely remember.

> That's a killer UI, and I'm happy to admit it's incredibly good for what I've seen/used of Qt apps over the years... but it's not the norm.

It's the norm for Qt apps since 2011 - 2012 when qml was introduced (of course, older apps use the older tech - and honestly, sometimes it makes more sense : at least all the colors, fonts, etc... will respect your desktop theme unlike "modern" toolkits). Here's how some QML code looks: https://github.com/jcelerier/TodoMVC-QML/blob/master/Main.qml ; as you can see, it's far from bloated (mostly due to the language being based on reactive semantics).

For instance a consequent part of KDE has been rewritten in QML and more is underway with Kirigami : https://dot.kde.org/2017/01/12/kde-releases-kirigami-ui-20

Handshake raised $10mm which was donated (all $10mm) to non-profit organizations and open source projects, including GNOME [1], Debian [2], KDE [3], among others.

Far from an "ICO scheme," the project further allocated the majority of the coins to developers and existing domain holders.

Unlike most decentralized projects you may be thinking of, Handshake is a real project and people are buying domains [4]. Compare the activity on chain with _____, and Handshake speaks for itself.

[1] https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/08/gnome-foundation-receives-400000-from-handshake-org/

[2] https://dot.kde.org/2020/01/21/kde-receives-generous-donation-handshake-foundation

[3] https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190329

[4] https://dns.live/

Sure, if they don’t mind Qt automatically being relicensing under BSD

“The little known KDE Free Qt Foundation makes sure that Qt stays free and open-source. It guarantees that all Qt modules currently licensed under LGPLv3 must continue to be available under LGPLv3 in the future. This covers all modules from Qt Essentials and many add-on modules. If The Qt Company discontinued the FOSS version of Qt, the Foundation would have the right to make Qt available under the BSD license. This is a very powerful protection of free and open-source Qt.“

https://www.embeddeduse.com/2019/12/21/safe-guarding-the-lgpl-future-of-qt/

https://dot.kde.org/2016/01/13/qt-guaranteed-stay-free-and-open-–-legal-update