KDE’s yearly fundraiser is now live, with the theme of spooooky proprietary software. Go check it out — no, really! It’s great!
I think this one absolutely nails it, because the stories there are relatable. They describe common problems with proprietary software most of us have personally experienced in our journeys to the FOSS world, and how FOSS fixes it.
Let me share some of mine:
- When I was a kid, I liked to make movies with my friends and add wacky special effects using a program called AlamDV. I even bought a license to it! After a year, it broke and the developer released version 2, which I dutifully also bought a new license for. Unfortunately, none of my AlamDV 1 projects opened in it. They were lost to the wind.
- Similarly, I also used Apple’s iMovie editing app. At a certain point, they changed it completely to have a totally different UI and no longer open old projects. Still a kid, I never managed to figure out the new UI and all my old projects were lost forever.
- A lot of the digital art I made as a kid was saved in Apple’s
.pictfile format, which even they eventually dropped support for. When I moved to Linux, I had to write a script to open these files individually and take screenshots of them in order to not lose them forever. - I’ve been able to consistently recycle older computers and keep them relevant with Plasma. Both of my kids have perfectly serviceable hand-me-down computers revitalized with Fedora KDE. My wife’s old 10 year-old laptop is a testbed for KDE Linux.
- My sister-in-law just last weekend was complaining to me about AI in Photoshop, and was very receptive to the idea of ditching Microsoft and Adobe software entirely. It’s a big turn-off to artists.
This stuff is real, and the work we do has significant impact. It’s not just a toy for nerds. It’s not a basement science project for bored tinkerers. It’s the way computers should be, and can be if enough of us donate our skills, time, and money towards the goal.
How will the fundraised money be used? Principally, to help KDE e.V. balance its budget and stop operating at a loss (about -110k last year, projected -70k this year) due to the legal requirement to spend down large lump-sum donations in a timely manner. We can sustain this level of deficit spending for a few more years, but of course would prefer not to. It’s been a tough environment for nonprofits, and you might have heard that the GNOME Foundation recently ran into financial trouble trouble had to cut back. We want to avoid that! The sooner we’re operating at a surplus again, the sooner we can expand our sponsorship of engineering work beyond its current level.
So go donate today, and make a difference in the most important movement in software today!
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
Love it!
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These stories ring true indeed. I have heard so many of these from customers. Everything from not being able to use their legally bought Adobe software on new OS versions, being forced to rent the expensive “cloud” versions instead to software suddenly dissapearing leaving lots of unusable proprietary files behind (thankfully in that case I managed to get LibreOffice to open them with a bit of trickery.)
In my company I often install Linux and KDE on old computers where new versions of Windows wouldn’t work, and my customers really like how well the software works and how nice it is I can customize it to their liking.
For me, one of the best things with the KDE Ecosystem is that I get a big set of apps that I know will be maintained (within some reason, of course). Not just the basics like a text editor, image viewer, etc but almost all software I need like an office suite, video editor, sound editor, Dev IDE, map viewer, etc, etc. For every new update to KDE Neon I can trust they will be there, perhaps even with some new features. Even things like Step, which I might be the only one using, is still getting updates. 🙂 That is actually completely amazing!
In regards to that I especially appreciate the KDE app initiative. Just yesterday I noticed Kwave is getting a new version – with is excellent. I will definitely donate more money in the future.
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Hm, back then I persuaded an animal welfare organization to use KWord. Then KWord was abandoned in favor of Calligra Words. Today, KWord documents cannot be opened with Calligra Words.
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Couldn’t KWord save into the ODF format [1], which is compatible with Calligra?
[1] https://nlnet.nl/project/odf-koffice/
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Add e.g. baskets to that. Nice note taking application for its time. Used it a lot. Still alive but started to lag behind the times, receving probably an update a year. The format is its own, probably simple to decipher, but still.
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You can also told about how MS restrict users. For example MS Office long do not open ODF files by default. It also restrict users in maner of preparing copy of digital art. And do something bad: restrict other OS to do not allow opening some digital art, so users of other OS had worse. Adobe Acrobat reader allows to restrict count of read of e-book. We can found many other examples. And of course: we do not own propertiary software. This kind of software is owned (any copy of it) by vendor. MS has made crime of selling used licenses, but at least UE told it should be 100% legal, so MS lose – most important is that this was done in the past. If we cannot sold digital good, which we bought, so does we own it? And in license text there is nearly always statement: not sold, but licensed.
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Let me play devil’s advocate for a bit. Essentially, almost anything you stated boils down not to proprietary code but to proprietary file formats being evil. And even this relates essentially only to files you intend to ‘archive’. If, say, the video project format is well documented, open and supported by a number of vendors in the same way, and they all produce the resulting movies in a well documented open format supported with everyone and their dog – will you really care about the interim conversion formats being one hell of proprietary? Or about the processing software itself being proprietary?
Now, let me go other direction. PDF as a file format is quite open and well documented, and Linux PDF readers cope with it quite well (but should cope better given that it’s open and well documented). Yesterday, I had to take a PDF file and put an annotation in Hebrew into it(I guess any RTL non-Latin language will show about the same behavior, so feel free to add Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and whatever I forgot, into the picture). The file itself was mixed Hebrew and English.
KDE pet of the month Okular allows to type in Hebrew but shows the annotation reversed. It’s quite a progress, formerly it just showed nothing. Well, I went to Firefox and annotated there. I also put in an annotation in English and a highlight.
Of 5 or 6 PDF readers I have on my Linux comp, all, except for Firefox, struggled. NONE showed the annotation in Hebrew (not even Okular which shows its own annotations just reversed. Half showed the highlighting opaque above the text. Some struggled so much that even the original PDF was garbled beyond any belief, partly reversed and partly the spaces were all wrong.
Adobe reader, on the other hand, showed the annotated PDF exactly as it was intended to be. Now, let me ask you another devil’s advocate question: is your time free? If your kid needs that PDF filled in and signed for tomorrow, (in Israel, they don’t bother a lot with PDF forms as it all can be easily done with annotations in Adobe Reader), will you spend a couple of days (in my case, it’s already years) looking for alternatives or just go to a Windows machine and use Adobe there and be done in a couple of minutes?
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Yeah, I recently found out that files done in MS Office XP may no longer be possible to open. All my master work is saved in that format and kept on CDs. It would be a pity if I couldn’t open it. I still hope that I also did pdf’s from those files or that LO may open it or there may be a way to import them.
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