Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1100787/

As part of KDE’s 30th
anniversary celebration, the project has released The KDE Documentary
— A Story of Free Software Underdogs (YouTube video):

The story starts in 1996, when Matthias Ettrich, a student at the University
of Tübingen, posted to a Usenet group asking for programmers to help build a
desktop for Linux. What followed became KDE, one of the largest free software
communities in the world. KDE made Linux usable as a desktop for people who
weren’t system administrators, giving it a complete, consistent graphical
environment at a time when there was none.

The film covers the highs and lows of three decades of KDE: the Qt licensing
fight and the rivalry with GNOME; the success of KHTML, the browser engine that
became the basis of Apple’s WebKit and Google’s Chrome; and the contentious
release of KDE 4 and the rebuild that followed.