Key KDE developer Jonathan Riddell quits • The Register

Sad news for KDE: one of the core people guiding the project for the whole century so far has left the building.

Jonathan Riddell, the former leader of both the Kubuntu and KDE neon distributions, has published an emotional blog post titled “Adios Chicos, 25 Years of KDE.” In it, he describes how changes in the corporate structure behind the KDE organization have resulted in his departure.

Riddell describes himself as a “Canoeist, Quaker, and Computer Person.” It’s a modest summary. Over the years, he’s been featured on The Register a few times. For instance, in 2020, he talked to the Reg about the importance of KDE. In a touch of foreshadowing, back in March, we reported that he planned to step down after the Plasma 6.3 release cycle.

Back in 2020, the Reg reported that he was employed by KDE backers Blue Systems, but no longer. Blue Systems used to be the company behind the Netrunner distro as well as Kubuntu’s corporate sponsor after Canonical, but no longer. In his post, Riddell says:

Last winter […] the guy who pays us started off by saying he was dying and the company would be shutting down. Which was very sad but it makes sense to end it on a high.

The philanthropist backer of Blue Systems [German] was Clemens Tönnies Jr, son of Bernd Tönnies, who founded “German meat processing giant Tönnies.” Clemens Tönnies Jr, who in 2022 was reported to have kidney disease [German], is the nephew of football sponsor Clemens Tönnies Sr.

The KDE project now has some commercial backing. KDE is the default desktop of Valve’s SteamOS, the Arch Linux-based OS of the multi-million selling Steam Deck handheld console. Several of the developers on the project also work for Spanish FOSS workers’ cooperative Igalia, which is also the company bringing the Rust-based Servo web-renderer back into active development.

Back in March, KDE developer and blogger Nate Graham wrote about KDE’s new corporate backer. It’s a company called Techpaladin, and its homepage links to Valve Corporation as well as the company behind the toolkit on which KDE is built, Qt Group.

Riddell’s post says that he suggested structuring the new company along the same lines as Igalia:

Shouldn’t this be run as a cooperative we wondered?

[…]

We watched a video about Igalia … They are a cooperative socialist paradise and Nate said he’d look into doing that instead of the setup where he had full control and all the profit. It was clear there was to be no other discussion on the matter of our future.

[…]

Instead, Nate gave his updated plan for a business which was to give Dave a slice of the profit and otherwise he’d keep all the profit and all the control. So I gave my proposal I’d been working on – for a company with equal ownership, equal profit, a management structure and workers’ rights. A couple weeks later, we had another video call, but Nate called me first and told me I’d be excluded from it.

In response to Riddell’s post, Graham has written his own blog entry, detailing his side of the story. He maintains that Blue Systems is not shutting down and that it still has several employees who did not move to Techpaladin.

He claims that he “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.” He even wrote that he would welcome Riddell back if he wanted to keep working on KDE.

Graham also said that Techpaladin does allow people to pay to join a partnership which makes it function more like Igalia, which Riddell referred to as a “cooperative socialist paradise.”

Riddell’s article is a sad read, and to us, it sounds very much like the process has been a painful and troubling one. In fairness, Riddell is no stranger to controversy, as is shown by some of his earlier appearances in the pages of The Register… such as in 2012 when Canonical redeployed him away from working on Kubuntu, and then in 2015 when the company took him off the project.

As he is such a well-known Linux developer and integrator, we hope he will find work soon, perhaps via his consultancy Edinburgh Linux.®