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Editorial
For whom do they speak?
It seemed as if the mystery had finally been solved.
The mystery is what the "K" in KDE stands for. There have been various explanations offered over the years, but nothing has "stuck."
For a time last week, one might have had reason to suppose that "K" was chosen because it is the letter that most resembles a goose-stepping soldier, arm raised in a salute not widely seen since the dark days of the early 1940s.
It began when KDE developer Waldo Bastian posted to the KDE-Cafe mailing list, an off-topic list organized a month or so ago by his wife, Tink, and hosted by kde.org.
"Am I the only one who finds it difficult to concentrate on code when the US and Israel are heading for WWIII?" he asked, appending a long column by the noted anti-semite Robert Fisk of the amusingly ill-named "Independent," a British newspaper.
There then followed an impressive storm of America-bashing with substantial hatred for Israel mixed in, just for fun. (Read it yourself if you like. The thread is entitled: "Fwd: The lies leaders tell when they want to go to war" and, while the threading of the KDE mailing list archives leaves a lot to be desired, it's all there.)
Now, far be it from any of us to deny anyone the right to an opinion or the right to voice that opinion. That is not the issue. The issue instead is making the distinction between the opinion of an individual and the opinion of the project as a whole.
In the course of the long and sometimes heated (when the developer fanboys weren't tripping all over themselves in self-congratulatory sycophancy) exchange, we saw many questionable positions taken by people with kde.org email addresses. Among them were a denunciation of The Bible, endorsement of something called the pacifist-socialist party and of socialism in general, a selective litany of historical events under the rubric "of know your facts," which were akin to reporting in outraged tones that a man had knocked an old woman to the ground while leaving out the fact that he did so to move her out of the way of a speeding train, and a general smattering of views not popular since 1944 or so, and then popular only within what was known as the Axis. Many of them -- and all that we're talking about now -- were voiced by people chiefly known under a kde.org address. (It is to be noted that some, including Tink herself and Andreas Farid Pour, president of the KDE League, did post under non-kde.org addresses, though Tink used her non-kde.org address also in moderation messages sent off-list to posters with whom she disagreed, and in any case the extent to which either is identified at all, it is through involvement in KDE.)
All that notwithstanding, the initial troll was from a KDE developer, using a kde.org email address, posting to a KDE-sponsored list. Anyone reading the thread will come away with the view that KDE is a product of anti-American, anti-semitic developers pushing an agenda of which the National Socialist party would have been proud, indeed was proud. (Waldo Bastian is a fine fellow, and in her contributions to KDE Tink has been personable, reasonable, and thoroughly competent. That tends to pale in the minds of those who might conclude that they have, wittingly or unwittingly, endorsed something very close to genocide of a people who have been targeted time and again for extermination, while at the same time attacking a country that for the most part invented the freedom that allows them to voice such opinions. It is paradoxical that those who most benefit from freedom are the loudest in its condemnation.)
One doesn't suppose that this is the aspect that the KDE project wishes to present to the world. If it is, then the KDE League, which has thusfar done from all appearances little or nothing, might issue a news release -- which would no doubt surprise some of those who are members of that organization. If it is not, then perhaps it would be wise for those involved in KDE to recognize that even the appearance of the kind of bias that is being displayed can only harm KDE (the software project, not the political movement), and work up a way to preserve the rights of those participating in KDE, without KDE itself getting dragged into it.
Because one of the greatest anti-Linux weapons available right now would be to point to that thread, started by a KDE developer with a KDE email address on a KDE mailing list, and say, "There's Linux for you. Do you really want to switch to a system governed by people like that?"
UPDATE: Beginning on the afternoon of Thursday, April 11, and following lengthy discussion of the above editorial, the following is appended to all new posts on the KDE-Cafe mailing list:
"DISCLAIMER: The views expressed on this mailinglist are the personal opinions of the author and do not represent KDE or the author's employer."