Mythbusting in the end of August

Coming back from vacations I think it’s a good time to set the clocks back at the right time. The month of August was not vacation time for everyone. In fact, there was a small revolution that went unnoticed if you did not pay attention to the events inside the OpenSuse Community. There was also a very good blog post by Matt Asay, but Matt still does not get that sometimes official stats and metrics do not reflect the reality well.

Today, I will try to bust some myths and attempt to explain why things are not always what they seem to be, especially in the field of Free/Libre and Open Source Software.

Myth #1: KDE is not mature enough

After some intense debate, the OpenSuse Community has decided that KDE 4 would be its default desktop.

This decision that some might find surprising is actually not so much a surprise than revealing the reality of the Linux desktop every day users. First, it shows that the Gnome desktop is not the most overwhelmingly used desktop environment for Linux. It may be the best funded desktop environment project, but it is not necessarily the most popular one (to be sure, it’s one of the two most popular Linux desktop environments). It is particularly striking to witness such a change inside the OpenSuse project. SUSE itself, before being integrated inside the Novell offerings, was a predominantly KDE distribution.

But with its acquisition and the buyout of Ximian, Gnome became the default, dragging along all the niceties we have come to appreciate so far such as Mono. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not pondering whether KDE is a better desktop than Gnome: I’m just pointing out that for years we were told that there was no other way outside Gnome by some who had vested economic interests in this platform. KDE did its transformation through its 4.0 release, offering a brand new platform. Gnome has a different philosophy: it aims at developing an easy to use desktop that can be easily portable. I am sure that we will see some radical improvements in the Gnome 3.0 release, albeit at a different pace and in a different way. Yet KDE 4 is quickly picking up steam by using some appealing technologies such as Qt, while Gnome has to deal with a legacy platform and its different GTK versions. These liabilities make OpenOffice.org look like a lightweight web application in comparison. It is of course impossible at this stage to guess who will be the dominant desktop environment on Linux in the next 5 or 10 years. Times are changing. On a personal level, I most often use Gnome but spend more and more time on KDE. In fact, this blog is written on KDE.

The announcement by the OpenSuse Community that it would revert back to KDE will hopefully help dispell some myths about the immaturity of KDE 4 and all the advantages of Gnome.

Myth #2: OpenOffice.org has an anemic market share.

The use of the word “anemic” comes from Matt Asay’s blog. Let me make this straight: OpenOffice.org in its sole 3.1 release has generated over 20 million downloads. The news can be found at the OpenOffice.org website, but the bottomline is that our infrastructure is suffering from the number of downloads. These downloads are just the ones officially counted in our infrastructure. There are many servers out there we simply don’t count in our stats. These downloads do not take into account the number of OpenOffice.org suites shipped with Linux distributions, and the numbers of these ones may be subject to controversy: but pretending that the total Linux market share for desktop is ridiculous (typically less than 2 %) is now more an ideological statement than an estimation to rely on. Fedora unique downloads and IP addresses ‘ counters report over a million users of Fedora 10. What about Ubuntu and its flavors? But let’s go back to OpenOffice.org: 20 million downloads for the 3.1 release, and we just released OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 .

Of course, these numbers may look anemic when compared to Microsoft Office. But the comparison may not be quite relevant; I don’t know many people who rush over to download Microsoft Office for free. They usually get it on their computers and don’t think about it much further. So Matt is essentially comparing apples to bananas. MS Office does not have to walk all the way to the user; it basically lands on consumers, thanks to longstanding OEM agreements with Microsoft and monopolistic practices. OpenOffice.org does not do that. We may be anemic to some, but we will never be monopolistic to anyone.