Do you need a license to criticize KDE?

You have to give to the project before you can speak up? What kind of nonsense is this?

technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Do you need a license to criticize KDE?

Dec. 23, 1999

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©1999, Al Fasoldt

   I upset a lot of KDE fans when I wrote that KDE needs better documentation.
   Some of them wrote to tell me to stop being so selfish. Help the project or get lost, some of them said.
   Try telling that to your mother. She finally gives in and lets you install Linux on her PC. She falls in love with Corel WordPerfect for Linux and notices right away that clicking on a WordPerfect document in a KDE folder window gets her nowhere. KDE doesn't know what to do.
   "I thought this Linux thing was the wave of the future?" she asks. "It is, Mom," you say. "But you have to help out first. You see, Linux and the KDE desktop are both Open Source projects. You can't criticize an Open Source project, Mom. The only acceptable way to improve KDE is to work together with the KDE developers. Criticizing KDE is just not how it's done."
   If your mother ever talked to you again after that, you'd be very lucky. You can't criticize KDE? You have to give to the project before you can speak up?
   Sorry, but I gave up my membership in the League of Non-Thinking Adults a long time back. My original comment in the preceding sentence was much less kind, but I erased it from my word processor's screen after realizing that many of the KDE developers are German and might misunderstand my standard wisecrack about fascist tactics. I am not, in any way, calling KDE developers or supporters fascists, but I am convinced that telling KDE users they should shut up unless they're willing to help the project is fascist from beginning to end.
   I hope everyone understands what that means. I grew up during the period that closed the Second World War. After rejecting a career as a man of faith -- I was enrolled in a divinity school and had been a child preacher, so I am not just whistling a religious tune here -- I devoted a great deal of my time trying to understand where fascism came from. I would be mocking all that honest effort if I allowed my critics to get away with this fascist behavior. I am free to say what I want about KDE or ham sandwiches or any other subject not because someone wearing a brown shirt tells me when and how I can speak. I am free to say what I want because I choose to excercise that right, because I refuse to let others take it away, because I care about a principle.
   Linux will succeed on its own merits, whether I help it or not. KDE does not need my comments or my suggestions. This is not a war. We do not need to silence those who want a better cannon. Microsoft is not the enemy.
   The enemy is much closer. And it's far more likely to win if we don't speak up for what we know is right.