That Was Fast: As Of Today Kraft Is Out Of KDE

Last month, we reviewed KDE's Kraft, an application designed to help small businesses with document creation and management. This was because a new beta  release was announced, and the new beta was based on  KDE Frameworks 5. It was all good news.


"I am very happy to announce the first public beta version of Kraft V. 0.80, the first Kraft version that is based on KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5.x."
 
Well, it seems that less than two months later, the marriage is over.


It seems to have stemmed from one singular comment on the original announcement page from commenter Pino Toscano:

"the source repository that so far is tracked by KDE tools (eg for translations, etc) is the one hosted on git.kde.org. While of course you are the maintainer of kraft, IMHO switching to a different repository as main one creates confusion, and potentially wastes work done by people (translations, contributions targeted to the non-monitored repository).
In https://github.com/dragotin/kraft/issues/3 I see mentioned github as preferred choice: while I recommend to switching back to git.kde.org as main one, at least please work out with the rest of the KDE community in case you wish kraft to not be a KDE project anymore."

The "in case you wish kraft to not be a KDE project anymore" part is somewhat perplexing. It appears that the comment could be construed as potentially hostile at most, and at the very least indifferent and apathetic towards this long-standing project and developer.  For reference, Kraft has been around since 2004, and part of KDE since not long after inception. 

The Issue

 

The issue at play here is the inference in the quote that unless the code resides on KDE Git, it should not be considered part of KDE. Whether this is the KDE Community's specific policy on the matter in this (or all cases) or not I am not at liberty to say. Additionally, it is not clear from Pino's comment if he was stating that, should the code not be hosted on KDE Git, it should be out. Further, I'm sure that Kraft's lead developer, dragotin, feels obligated to host his code wherever he wishes.

Nonetheless, dragotin acknowledged that getting code contributions, translations, and other beneficial services become somewhat more difficult with the code sitting on it's own island, outside of KDE and residing on Github. Then again, it's not like Kraft was seeing a whole lot of benefit from the KDE Community.

"Kraft has come a long way together with KDE. I started Kraft in (probably) 2004, gave a talk about Kraft at the Akademy Dublin 2006, maintained it with the best effort I could contribute until today. There is a small but loyal community around Kraft. During all the time I got little substancial contribution to the code directly, with the exception of one cool developer who got interested for some time and made some very interesting contributions. When I asked a for the subdomain http://kraft.kde.org long time ago I got the reply that it is not in the interest of KDE to give every little project a subdomain. As a result I reserved http://volle-kraft-voraus.de and run it since then, happily showing a “Part of the KDE family” logo on it. Beside the indirect contributions to libraries that Kraft uses, I shipped Kraft with the translations made by the KDE i18n team, for which I always was very grateful. Otherwise I got no other services from KDE."

What happens now?

Hopefully, some follow-up will give way to some understanding as to whether there is a way forward with Kraft being a part of the KDE Community. It's clear from today's leaving KDE announcement that the developer has a rather fond option of KDE despite today's announcement and the rough history outlined above. What the community can do to resolve this will remain to be seen. Further, in either case, lessons need to be learned as to how to best minimize the chances of something like this happening in the future.

Also, all of this happening due to one comment on a blog post should serve as a friendly? reminder that how we say things is as important as what we say. We'll see what transpires, and if there is more to the story there will be a follow-up here.

These types of business and commercial-friendly applications and the communities around them are a vital part of the KDE Community's potential for growth in attracting new users and new opportunities going forward. And, certainly, it would be a shame if instead of KDE one day announcing "Kraft joins KDE Office Applications", it were to just quietly leave as a result of a singular comment on a blog announcement.

Links:

 

- Kraft out of KDE
- Kraft Moving to KDE Frameworks: Beta Release!