Adios Chicos, 25 Years of Kde

what you describe is not the best for anything.

but sadly is the direction it will go, because people see the dollar signs "when valve buys the license" which will never happen because that ship already sailed.

No. Jonathan was co-maintaining KDE neon, which now has one developer left and is about to be joined by KDE Linux, another take on a Plasma-based distro. He also handled release manager duties, which have been transferred and running smoothly for a few months now.

He may have contributed in other ways that I'm not aware of, but overall KDE is in a very good spot with many more developers working on stuff.

No. This is one person leaving.

For example, I just had to "race a memory leak" from the UI and the only resource available (in UI) was System Monitor. Unfortunately the memory leak won, and System Monitor never launched after 20 seconds, the system finally froze (during a system update), and now it's borked.

Ah thanks! we've merged that thread hither.

Another take, from a more recent Blue Systems / Techpaladin developer: https://akselmo.dev/posts/bluesystems-to-techpaladin/

Honestly, it seems some very technically minded people are very naive and very unprepared in regards to practical and legal aspects of life elsewhere.

While building a career over such a project like KDE is certainly laudable it seems it leaves people in a very precarious position where the number of companies worldwide where you can be employed at any given time can be counted with the fingers in one hand, with some to spare

Doesn’t sound like we have the full story from either side. This blog post from Nate reads like he is continuing to gaslight. But then Jonathan doesn’t explain why he didn’t just buy into the partnership like the other 2 did if he wanted to be a co-owner.

Thanks for sharing that. Nate’s article links to a comment in which he says the US has no legal cooperative structure “except for limited state-specific exceptions”. I don’t know why those state-specific laws for cooperatives don’t count - they aren’t in any way restricted to operating within the organizing state. I am a member/owner of a grocery store organized under NY’s cooperative corporation law, and they definitely do business with out of state suppliers.

But that organization operates on a one person, one vote model, not a one dollar, one vote model. He seems to want one person to put in a disproportionate amount of investment capital and end up with a disproportionate amount of voting authority. That’s not the kind of “cooperative socialist” model which Jonathan was advocating, it’s a standard capitalist one.

And I’m not saying that he has no right in the way the world works now to operate as a capitalist. He does. But he shouldn’t be surprised if someone who wants a cooperative model doesn’t view that as even aspirationally qualifying and isn’t satisfied by vague comments about how workers can gradually buy their way toward an approximation of equal power.

These are well-renowned books but I agree that it was hard to get started writing windows software. Win16 and Win32 were very strange APIs with a mixture of having to do things yourself, having the OS do it for you, and the OS calling you at unexpected times to get things done. WndProcs were re-entrant, because while you are handling WM_MOUSE you could get called by the OS to do a WM_PAINT. The whole architecture lends itself to spaghetti.

Or, you could use MFC, and then you just had to trust the library to do things right. Debugging your code wasn't easy because it would get lost in things that MFC was doing that you don't fully understand. A lot of the source code was available, however.

Or, you could use WTL, which was a third party library at the time that gave you a different way of doing it.

Debugging into/through Windows itself was really difficult due to the lack of source code. All you had were symbols and assembly. Because of how it worked, you could easily find memory corruption in your program because of some boneheaded thing you did, but finding the cause of it was hard because of its highly non-sequential nature.

Qt had a nicer approach with signals and slots, and used a more object-oriented way of building the software. Software was easier to understand. It also worked on Windows, but IIRC that part wasn't free. It is a long time since the late 90s so I am not sure about my memory. I enjoyed using Qt, though, and found it to be a much better programming model than straight Win32 or MFC. KDE was a great little system circa 2000, and it introduced the Konqueror browser that gave us the future we have today.

Anyhow, that is a lot to say that I understand how an intelligent person could read Petzold and still feel like a dummy. Writing Windows software in the late 90s/early 2000s was often humbling and there wasn't as much support from things like StackOverflow and the rest at the time.

It’s very common in the tech world to have a relationship between companies and international remote workers which legally meets the definition of employment in one or both countries but which pretends in the contract wording to be an independent contracting relationship.

A lot of companies decide that the risk of getting caught in this deception and the penalties which would be imposed in that case are lower than the hassle, expense, and uncertainty of doing things the legal way; while some truly don’t even realize that it is in fact a deception. And there’s very little legal risk for the employee aside from the loss of rights and benefits they should be entitled to and legally unwarranted extra financial burdens on their part, so they often bow to macroeconomic factors and accept what sources of income they can find.

Independent contracting can of course be fully legitimate if the substance of the relationship is arranged to match what the law understands independent contracting to mean. Maybe Nate’s legal advisors correctly concluded that the arrangement he’s implementing falls in this category. Maybe.

But when the substance of the relationship is employment and only the legalese and payroll look like contracting, then what’s actually happening is the employer is dodging a lot of mandatory contributions to the employee’s local social security systems (such as pension and healthcare) and a lot of the mandatory employment protections applicable in that jurisdiction.

This also pushes some or all of the mandatory contributions and benefits which legally should be the employer’s financial responsibility onto the misclassified employee, and usually without a sufficiently compensatory increase in contracting rate vs the amount they’d be paying in salary if it were correctly handled as employment. (The illegal contracting rate in an international context might still very well be above legal local employment salaries. But I’m instead comparing to what the salary would be if the exact same working relationship were handled according to the law, such as the same employer might often offer to employees in their headquarters jurisdiction.)

The employee can make a huge mess for the employer if they ever report the misclassification to the authorities with adequate proof of the true nature of the relationship, because misclassifying an employee as an independent contractor is illegal. The employer will often be audited and required to pay unpaid social contributions going back years. Sometimes the employee can also recover contributions they paid which should never have been their responsibility according to the law. But most don’t want to risk informal blacklisting from the industry or even the stress of engaging in that complaint process in the first place.

What seems to have happened is:

Blue Systems had a contract with Valve to work on KDE; Blue Systems no longer wanted to be in the contracting business; several Blue Systems employees (Nate and someone else) formed a company, Techpaladin, which Nate and that person own; said company bought out the Valve contract from Blue Systems.

Jonathan also worked at Blue Systems but seems to have wanted to be part of Techpaladin as an owner without putting any cash in to buy out the Valve contract from Blue Systems.

That said, leaping straight to workers rights, losing kids, and publicly mischaracterizing the events in this way... smells like crazy.

This is my takeaway as well. Having brushed up against a few things like this, I assume there is more back-and-forth about reorganizing Tech Paladin than what is published. However, I am certainly not suggesting an escalatory exposé of communications, as it likely does nothing to change the two bottom line facts: Riddell was not included in the new company, possibly over their disagreement regarding company structure, but this isn't something we could know for certain. Following that, Riddell decided to end contributions to KDE.

EDIT: Updated to reflect details from https://pointieststick.com/2025/09/16/a-few-corrections-abou... reflecting that "...at no point was [Nate Graham] or Techpaladin ever Jonathan’s employer."