KDE on Windows is not dead yet

First of all, I want to say something about an article that has been released on the Linux Magazin - about the step down of Christian Ehrlicher as a developer for KDE on Windows.
This is not easy for us as Christian has done quite a lot of work in the background as making packages and fixing builderrors and bugs. This doesn't mean though that he has been the only one to do those tasks. The Amarok Nightlies have been done nearly totally independent of the rest by Björn Schröder and Oluf Lorenzen; in between the releases Christian made, I made some of them too, and also Ralf Habacker and Holger Schröder are able to build packages (those are the ones that currently are allowed to upload, this list can of course be extended). So packages will be provided in the future as they have been in the past.

The second point I want to address is the criticism made by Christian in his post. Although Till has corrected it here and here I do remember that the feelings we had back when kdab joined KDE on Windows development were far more optimistic than what was achieved in the time. I think this is normal and can happen in other places too. I think though that we have to look further and always check what possibilities we do have to work together and how we can achieve the best together. Due to the pure nature of the different intents that companies and private persons do have if they develop on KDE we will never have the exact same opinion on some issues (the packaging is such an issue here). The same applies to probably all companies in this area, just think of Qt Software & Qt.

And last I want to mention something that has struck me again when reading the comments both in Linux Magazin and below Christians blog post: I never want to read again those comments along the line "good that you have found back to the free OS and you no longer waste time". All those of you out there thinking like that, just try to switch on your brain at least once and think why it is called "free" software. It is not free as in beer, it is free as in freedom, and I reclaim hereby the freedom to develop for Windows. And for Linux. And for BSD. And for Solaris. And for Mac. And for all those other OSs I don't even know but which might run KDE one day.