KDE king Seigo talks life, free software and reinventing the desktop

What do you think of the support KDE has received from the Linux distributors, many of which have chosen GNOME as their default desktop environment?

We need to get better at collaborating on the commonalities. In China, Linux has something like 15 percent of the desktop and most of that is KDE. We see people in the market making this choice. People choose KDE - look at the Asus Eee PC. They are on target for about 5 million sales by mid year. I look at that and say could it have been better. We have a lot of success to point at. What I find unfortunate is that some companies dig into technologies. Canonical did not communicate well about long-term support and therefore neglected 35 percent of their user base. A user base they routinely neglect, but at KDE we ignore a lot of this.

Why was the 4.0.0 release made when it was still under heavy development? You have also been criticized from within the KDE project, how does that feel?

With the 4.0.0 release we were addressing three audiences: the device integrators like ASUS; third-party application developers who won't do anything until there is a stable release; and our user base that is into bleeding-edge technology. The majority of people understood it and some didn't, and those people were very vocal and that's kind of to be expected. We are individuals that hate change and socially that is a good thing. Most people are not great at seeing very far into the future. Because a lot of the stuff in KDE 4.0.0 is visionary and it's not just an incremental set of changes you need to see where it's going and there is a lot of stuff yet to come that will blow people away.

With Plasma you will be able to whip up things in JavaScript and take that same thing and put it on a TV, a phone, and put applets embedded in a Web page. If I was crazy I'd say we have something that can challenge Flash in the long term

Criticism from within the KDE project always hits home the hardest. You have to believe in what you are doing. The deltas between the beta, release candidate and 4.0.0 speak for themselves and from 4.0.0 to 4.1 is huge again. In a couple of years this is all going to be footnote stuff and people will be glad we stuck with it. I see KDE4 as our Boeing 747 - it nearly killed Boeing but catapulted them to the number one plane company in the world. It was monumental. We are re-imaging what a desktop should be, we are introducing social semantics to the desktop, and we are inventing something that looks nicer than what Apple has.