By now, many have probably read Jonathan Riddell’s blog post yesterday about his departure from KDE and the events that led up to it. And today, an article has been published in ItsFoss about the topic that unfortunately seems to have misunderstood some of the details of Jonathan’s post. I didn’t want to have to write this post, but since I’m named personally in both places, and there are inaccuracies spreading out there, I thought it would make sense to correct the record before this becomes too much of a game of telephone.
Overall it’s a very sad situation, and I want to make it clear that I bear no malice or ill will towards Jonathan. As for the internal details of the transition of many of Blue Systems’ personnel to Techpaladin Software, Jonathan is entitled to his interpretation of events, and that’s fair. But it was a delicate transition, and people also have a right to personal and professional privacy. As such, it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to get into anything non-public about individual people’s personal and work situations, motivations, or decisions.
So there are some parts of the story that are going to have to go un-told in public, at least by me. But I can correct the record about misunderstandings and errors, and offer my own perspective!
I’ll start with the ItsFoss article:
First of all, Jonathan never wrote in his post that he saw KDE itself “moving away from the cooperative and transparent model he valued”, or that decision-making was increasingly concentrated under me. Jonathan’s blog post wrote about his relationship with me in the context of the Blue Systems to Techpaladin transition, not about KDE itself. KDE itself is fine — better than fine, really. KDE is thriving, with competitive board elections this year and an increased base of donations it can use to assert a measure of independence from commercial entities.
It’s also not true that Techpaladin was “meant to continue supporting KDE neon after Blue Systems scaled back.” Jonathan didn’t write this, and it was never the case. Techpaladin was and is a vehicle to take over the contract work that Blue Systems had been engaging in, after its manager made the decision to discontinue that work. KDE neon was never a part of this.
There are also a few topics from Jonathan’s original post that need addressing. First of all, Blue Systems is not shutting down. I was just talking to a happy Blue Systems person at Akademy last week. As I mentioned, what actually happened is that Blue Systems divested itself of the consultancy element that it had picked up a few years prior. Blue Systems is still around as a company, and is still employing people who want to work there. Several people opted to stay there rather than moving over to Techpaladin. And at no point was I or Techpaladin ever Jonathan’s employer.
I also want to make it 100% clear that I never made any effort to shut Jonathan out of anything in KDE, never encouraged anyone else to cut off contact with Jonathan or shut him out of anything in KDE, and never pulled strings behind the scenes to make it happen without looking like it was happening. Nothing of the sort! If Jonathan came back to KDE, I would be happy to rebuild a collegial relationship over topics of shared interest.
Finally, regarding company structure and employment details, I went into this a few months ago in https://pointieststick.com/2025/03/10/personal-and-professional-updates-announcing-techpaladin-software/#comment-40233. Techpaladin’s current company structure actually allows people interested in making it more “co-op-like” to buy their way into partnership, which is how Igalia — the “cooperative socialist paradise” that Jonathan mentioned — does this as well. I’m confident that no laws are being broken here; I exhaustively researched the employment laws of 7 countries and then confirmed my conclusions with a lawyer before moving forward with anything. In addition, we practice financial transparency and cooperative decision-making on the topics of hiring, new contracts, etc. So internally it’s quite “co-op like” already.
But this is my first time co-running a company of this size and complexity, so I’m sure I’m making mistakes and can do better. Now that the company has survived the initial setup and been around for 7 months, there’s some breathing room to explore that. But from the start, the whole point has been to put money into the hands of people doing extraordinary KDE work that makes the world a better place, and to provide all of us with more agency over our KDE careers.
Hopefully all of this makes sense. If anyone has any further questions, I’d encourage them to ask publicly or privately, and I’ll do my best to answer what I can that doesn’t compromise anyone’s personal or professional privacy.
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
It is a shame, that there is a disagreement, which has lead to Jonathan departing from. Of course, as a longterm KDE-user, this is a little concerning and also has clearly a human, tragical side, as KDE obviously is more than just a thing, but has a family side, where friendships are formed. Not being involved in this, it is of course kind of impossible and does not make sense to take sides. Just wishing for you both and may be others involved, if there is still a willingness from both sides, to make another attempt to sort this out. May be with help/mediation from out side. It might not be easy, but it would fit to my perception of the KDE community, that this could be successful. Anyway, best for both of you!
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hmm.
to be totally honest kde’s weird obsession with things like kdenlive while neglecting extremely basic functionality such as everything to do with input (touch, virtual keyboards/inputs, accessibility, etc) followed by the unhappy departure that more or less confirms that those higher up don’t really seem to be as interested in making a functional DE/software and just keep getting distracted by whatever seems new or shiny while abandoning the useful.
i’m hesitant to believe you.
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Those things you listed (input) has more to do with Wayland issues and not KDE. Open source development isn’t a zero sum game, it’s composed of different developers who have different interests and skill sets. There’s no “higher up” dictating the direction of kde, just a collaborative effort of volunteers working on the things they want to work on. If you want something to get better, then sponsor a developer to do it or program it yourself.
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There has been a lot of input related work over the last year or so, especially recently.
Joshua Goins, for example, has achieved great improvements to tablet handling, from Plasma down to kernel driver level.
Farid Abdelnour recently reported on the progress of the new Plasma virtual keyboard on KDE’s discussion form and for users’ input on additional features and use cases.
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I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect anybody to understand a nuanced and private situation like this without having been ‘in the room.’ Both parties have my sympathy.
“It’s Foss” does not, their writing and ‘journalism’ has always been questionable at best, and their inability to fact-check basics (or even disingenuously misread direct blog posts, as is the case here,) shows a distinct lack of quality.
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ItsFoss article is sadly bad “journalism”, distorting the original source and doing no investigation, at least picking elements from other sides of the story…
Even in Jonathan’s post, I see KDE misrepresented as a uniform company, just like in comments an many parts of the Internet on other topics.
I see mainly KDE as a platform (common coding components and habits, tools), loosely driven by a diverse community (the people gathering at akademy and voting in KDE eV being a tiny motivated subset of all contributors).
In that subset, there is an even narrower subset of “professionals” (developing strategic aspects for some markets), paid by various structures (distros, hardware vendors, public sectors…).
In such context, I don’t understand how one can be blacklisted by a whole “KDE” group, as such homogeneous group doesn’t exist.
Even in packaging area (Jonathan’s topic), there are various options beyond ubuntu basis to get involved in: Debian, Fedora, Suse, Arch, many teams need help in tracking the updates, dependencies evolution, understand build failures and debug the resulting programs…
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I wrote a timeline here https://akselmo.dev/posts/bluesystems-to-techpaladin/
Not that it is necessary nor necessarily public information anyway, but whatever.
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I read Riddell’s blog post, the ItsFoss article, and the ElReg article.
My comment is: Keep up the good work Nate. You are here day in and day out helping move things forward.
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Sometimes there must be changes to grow, otherwise you stay behind and lose,
because there will never be a standstill, either grow and accept or lose changes …
Of course you lose some people, things or things, but there is also something new and new possibilities, which you can grow from, if some, because of -hear/his world view do want to go,
of course you can go your own way if it doesn’t fit for your worldview ..
because everyone has different worldviews in a sense and sees the world with different eyes ..
Some grow on it, some go under … or his own way, because not agree or not fit .. so gives every different view on the things..
keep it up Nate.
best
Blacky
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One way or the other the KDE ecosystem needs new funding sources and stable employment of key personnel. Maybe a Eurostack project could help for the future. We need to get the garden in order.
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Nate, you lead KDE to the deep hole.
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