So, first off, it seems like Jonathan Riddell not working on KDE anymore is a huge loss for the KDE community.
But I'm not sure I really understand what happened. AFAICT, Valve had a contract with Blue Systems, specifically a subunit of Blue Systems that does KDE development. Blue Systems decided to sell that subunit to Techpaladin, Nate Graham's company. Riddell was unhappy about this, and proposed that... I guess that Blue Systems not sell to Techpaladin? Or that Techpaladin reorganize itself into a worker-owned company? And then when Graham declined to do this, stuff happened, and eventually Riddell got fired from Techpaladin, or not hired by Techpaladin, and now Riddell is not getting paid to work on KDE. So Riddell has (not unreasonably) decided to stop working on KDE. And the other people who once worked for Blue Systems and now work for Techpaladin have decided to keep working for Techpaladin.
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.
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.
> 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.
My guess since he’s talking about IRS rules is because the IRS doesn’t recognize those exemptions specifically and so it’s irrelevant for the federal structure of the company which they also have to have. Technically speaking even LLCs don’t really exist at the federal level. The IRS does note that it is a legal structure that states provide, but also notes that depending on how you’re structured, they will treat you as either a non-entity (basically pass through, like a sole proprietorship), as a partnership (collective pass through, no liability shields) or as a full corporation (S or C corp). There is a little bit in Subchapter T around taxing businesses that operate under a “cooperative basis” but it still seems like you’re still either a corporation or a partnership
Oh, the example I gave is still a corporation for tax purposes, for sure. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But it doesn’t have shares in the sense that can be bought or sold or even profited from upon redemption, unless I guess the coop were to liquidate in which case the value they get for their membership interest might be higher or lower than they paid. (It’s highly unlikely ever to liquidate - it’s been responsibly managed financially for over 50 years.)
They only have member/owners who are entitled to exactly one vote by virtue of having made the rather nominal member investment (and not having redeemed that investment after leaving the coop), or having joined too soon before the vote to have yet missed the deadline to make that investment.
When I say rather nominal member investment, I mean $100, or $10 for people receiving certain low-income government benefits. (They also have a once-per-lifetime non-refundable joining fee of $25 or $5 respectively.) Nothing like the $100k example Nate gave in his comment for a dominant shareholder not happy with the prospect of being outvoted by others with much smaller investments.
Your framing seems somehow backwards. Based on the other article[0] Nate and David bought out the business from Blue Systems. Jonathan (previously employed by Blue) proposes a co-op model, the new owners say “no thanks, we’re good”. Jonathan is surprised at this, storms out, detonating all the bridges on the way.
My framing seems backwards because I’m commenting on what Nate wrote, not on what Jonathan wrote. As you and I have both said, with the way the world works now Nate is within his rights not to want to found a cooperative, and Jonathan is within his rights to be surprised that none of his colleagues care about this like he does.
My point is simply this: Nate shouldn’t pretend that the model he’s proposing is or ever will become the kind of thing Jonathan is advocating for, because it’s not and will not, but I think Nate is pretending that.
From what Jonathan wrote, I also don’t think he intended to storm out. I think he intended to advocate for something, likely with enough frustration and emotion that others who disagreed with him noticed the intensity of his feelings, and they decided to exclude him from further discussions to avoid drama rather than ever engaging with him to give their firm final decision in a calm but explicit way. They weren’t willing to give him a clear final no and instead ostracized him as part of their implicitly stated no.
To be clear, I agree with your implication that Jonathan likely didn’t handle this in the way that would be best for his professional career going forward, insofar as he may not have been calm and diplomatic in his private advocacy and then went quite public with the level of venting we just read. But Nate’s response didn’t make him look good either; it felt as disingenuous as Jonathan’s earnest blog post may have been interpersonally unwise.
Personally I prefer earnest but interpersonally unwise over disingenuous, since it’s easier to fix with constructive criticism and emotional support. But I know a lot of investors and employers don’t feel that way.
I think Jonathan was disappointed because he honestly thought he was among like-minded friends, people he'd known and worked with for so long; he clearly didn't expect to be rebuffed so hard.
I've been in similar situations, and it's hard to stay professional in those cases. The feeling of personal betrayal is significant. Add to this that most old-school Linux hackers like him are often motivated by striving for social justice, and somewhat expect everyone who works with them to fundamentally wish the same things. Discovering that long-term collaborators actually wish to be regular techbros, must sting.
Yeah, a lot of different types of people get involved in this ecosystem, not only the stereotypical primarily altruistically motivated old-school hacker. This is especially true for the for-profit sector rather than among the purely volunteer part of the community.
That said, only some of them would be tech bro wannabes. Others might not want to try to rock the boat in this awful economy, in the sense of not wanting the career consequences of having been part of a failed attempt to form a cooperative when the company ends up capitalist in the end, or simply might be skeptical that a cooperative would succeed well enough to meet their genuine financial needs.
I am a Debian developer myself, though quite inactive for the last 6 or so years due to life circumstances. Plenty of people even in that world end up working for the man, in such forms as Google or Dropbox or the like, even if they’d rather not. Life is expensive and the world is capitalist with bills to pay.
Had to check, but it seems that KDE is "owned" (or legally represented and its trademarks owned by) a german nonprofit, KDE eV. Wouldn't there be a possibility for Riddell (or anuone in the community) to create a cooperative in Germany or any other part of the EU, just like the galician folks?
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.
Probably because he didn't have the capital. He's been doing KDE work for ages behind the scenes, but I don't think that made him much money. He hints at the fact that his professional condition hampered his attempt to keep his adopted kids with him, which would indicate he's not particularly wealthy.
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
> 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
Your average KDE contributor is an expert in at least two widely used technologies, C++ and Qt, and typically in several more. Purely KDE-related work may not be a huge employment market, but trust me it's not that hard for KDE folks to find work in general, and you will find them in many high places.
That is to say that contributing is definitely not putting you into any precarious career positions :-)
We never had workers rights at Blue Systems, we were all on self employment contracts. This will continue at Tech Paladin. It is illegal but unenforceable when done on an international setup. But employment rights are not a luxury you can chose to do without if you enjoy your job and want some more flexibility in your work day. They are fundamental and life altering rights that change people’s lives as I discovered when my adopted children were taken away from me. Nobody should be doing business with or taking money from Tech Paladin else be party to illegal workers rights abuses.
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.
Yeah, that part of the blog post wasn’t clear to me either. I assume that’s only clear to people with other context that wasn’t included. Maybe whichever agency oversees the welfare of adopted kids where he lives is more skeptical of the financial responsibility and solvency of tech workers with an illegally misclassified contract with an international client/payor than people with a locally recognized legal employment contract with proof of paying into the system?
Interesting, thanks. In the United States contracting so often just means that we have the same shitty job security as the full-time employees who are a little delusional about how safe they are, we occasionally have to talk about renewing the contract, and we get paid twice as much. There's no logic to it but it's not quite as awful as what's painted above.
What I said is even true in the US - employers have payroll and other compliance obligations such as their portion of Social Security and Medicare taxes, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation insurance, sometimes a state-specific requirement for short-term disability insurance, and often more. Plus health insurance and paid time off are usually part of the package for employees at least in the tech world, and COBRA rights exist after losing the job. Plus unionization rights too.
For independent contractors, all of those things are either fully the responsibility of the contractor (such as the Social Security and Medicare taxes) or absent entirely (such as the unionization rights). Whether that’s legal even in the US depends on whether the relationship is misclassified employment or true independent contracting. (These are among several reasons why true independent contractors charge much higher rates than people who just acquiesce to employer misclassification.) The IRS has a many-factor test based on the common law and is absolutely willing to hear reports of alleged misclassification. So are many state and local government agencies.
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.
I got distracted by the Quaker thing and went down a rabbit hole. But overall Jonathan seems like a decent person and major loss to KDE. Only thing I'm confused about is why he got shunned and I guess he had issues with his family too. Just about anything could explain that so I feel like that's a critical piece here but I'm not looking to violate anyones privacy or force them to divulge such information. Just something that could explain where Jonathan is coming from in all this.
I read Nate's response and it seems very hand wavy. Regardless hope Jonathan can continue doing what he loves somewhere else.
> But in the end I lost my friends, my colleagues, my job, my career and my family.
As a Plasma user and a part of a KDE team for 10 years at some time (in the past), reading this really breaks my heart. I hope Jonathan can find peace and healing.
I would encourage you to reach out the the friends you have worked with. Currently, this other person is controlling the narrative, and your friends may have been fed a very inaccurate view of what has happened.
Oof. I've had the experience of ex-colleagues, some of whom I thought had become friends, suddenly stopping all communication with me (In my case because I spoke up against mental and physical abuse against others). It hurt a lot. Hope surfing the wave helps.
KDE has done a great job keeping up a good desktop environment. They need to be careful not to let developers determine resource usage, as we got ksysguard replaced with an inferior System Monitor this way.
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.
It’s commendable to want to start a “cooperative socialist paradise”, you can pitch it and see if there’s interest with others. But it’s totally OK as well for others to not want to join that, and go the more conventional way.
It sounds like Nate is set on starting a conventional company, and that should be fine. The previous company apparently never made financial sense so it also doesn’t work to just continue that model directly and so things and people get cut. It can be both hard to communicate and to hear, doubly so when you’re emotionally invested. That’s why IMO it’s important to separate your self worth from your job at some level, for your own mental wellbeing.
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.
For others who might not know, KDE Neon is a distribution. I was initially confused because I thought it might have been an alternative desktop environment to KDE Plasma.
This is probably the greatest curse and blessing of modern Linux: there are an impractical number of distributions. I guess you could probably say the same thing for desktop environments, various services, bootloaders, etc.
End of the world? Finisterra in Galicia, Spain?
That's in the Northwest past of Spain, facing the Atlantic.
As you might guess, the currents and cliffs were so rough that the locals named the place "The end of the world" (Finis Terrae in Latin).
On KDE, the best for the project would be an inmutable distro with Flatpak.
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.
For GNU/Linux, Flatpak it might be if GNU promoted a trully FOSS repo; but they already made
their own Flatpak with GUIX, and the inmutable distro it's GuixSD itself with Plasma.
On 'the ship already sailed', Gnome's performance it's really bad compared to Plasma.
GNU would never promote Flatpak, because Flathub isn't FOSS-only, and bringing proprietary software vendors into the Linux ecosystem seems like it was one of the goals of Flatpak into the first place.
> It was the turn of the millenium when I got my first computer fresh at university. Windows seemed uninteresting, it was impossible to work out how it worked or write programs for it.
What? There were plenty of books out by Petzold, Richter and Prosise.
> But in the end I lost my friends, my colleagues, my job, my career and my family. What’s a spod who just tried to do the right thing for society to do?
I don't see enough people reflecting on this, much less in the open source community. Props to the author for being so honest about it.
HN has a culture that is very eager to promote passionate computing, and I still consider that good thing. At the same time though, we put an immense amount of faith in technology, that "fixing" a problem in code or hardware will make it go away. It's a great religion for motivated tech workers, but also still a passionate lie. There are so many extenuating things that determine success and define your problem space, it becomes almost wasteful to sacrifice your personal wellbeing to "fix" a problem and renew your faith in technology.
This happens everywhere, in startups and open source projects alike. Take care of yourselves, people.
Nate sounds like the kind of person to lie to your former colleagues about you; I'd suggest reaching out to them to tell them what happened. Staying silent is letting Nate win.
So, first off, it seems like Jonathan Riddell not working on KDE anymore is a huge loss for the KDE community.
But I'm not sure I really understand what happened. AFAICT, Valve had a contract with Blue Systems, specifically a subunit of Blue Systems that does KDE development. Blue Systems decided to sell that subunit to Techpaladin, Nate Graham's company. Riddell was unhappy about this, and proposed that... I guess that Blue Systems not sell to Techpaladin? Or that Techpaladin reorganize itself into a worker-owned company? And then when Graham declined to do this, stuff happened, and eventually Riddell got fired from Techpaladin, or not hired by Techpaladin, and now Riddell is not getting paid to work on KDE. So Riddell has (not unreasonably) decided to stop working on KDE. And the other people who once worked for Blue Systems and now work for Techpaladin have decided to keep working for Techpaladin.
Am I missing something? Being unfair to someone?
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."
This story need some context. Who are Nate and Dave? Why the deal with Steam went automatically to Nate?
UPDATE: Apparently it was a deal done months ago with the Blue Systems owner: https://pointieststick.com/2025/03/10/personal-and-professio...
Another take, from a more recent Blue Systems / Techpaladin developer: https://akselmo.dev/posts/bluesystems-to-techpaladin/
[flagged]
The other side of the story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45266332
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.
> 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.
My guess since he’s talking about IRS rules is because the IRS doesn’t recognize those exemptions specifically and so it’s irrelevant for the federal structure of the company which they also have to have. Technically speaking even LLCs don’t really exist at the federal level. The IRS does note that it is a legal structure that states provide, but also notes that depending on how you’re structured, they will treat you as either a non-entity (basically pass through, like a sole proprietorship), as a partnership (collective pass through, no liability shields) or as a full corporation (S or C corp). There is a little bit in Subchapter T around taxing businesses that operate under a “cooperative basis” but it still seems like you’re still either a corporation or a partnership
Oh, the example I gave is still a corporation for tax purposes, for sure. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But it doesn’t have shares in the sense that can be bought or sold or even profited from upon redemption, unless I guess the coop were to liquidate in which case the value they get for their membership interest might be higher or lower than they paid. (It’s highly unlikely ever to liquidate - it’s been responsibly managed financially for over 50 years.)
They only have member/owners who are entitled to exactly one vote by virtue of having made the rather nominal member investment (and not having redeemed that investment after leaving the coop), or having joined too soon before the vote to have yet missed the deadline to make that investment.
When I say rather nominal member investment, I mean $100, or $10 for people receiving certain low-income government benefits. (They also have a once-per-lifetime non-refundable joining fee of $25 or $5 respectively.) Nothing like the $100k example Nate gave in his comment for a dominant shareholder not happy with the prospect of being outvoted by others with much smaller investments.
Your framing seems somehow backwards. Based on the other article[0] Nate and David bought out the business from Blue Systems. Jonathan (previously employed by Blue) proposes a co-op model, the new owners say “no thanks, we’re good”. Jonathan is surprised at this, storms out, detonating all the bridges on the way.
[0] https://pointieststick.com/2025/03/10/personal-and-professio...
My framing seems backwards because I’m commenting on what Nate wrote, not on what Jonathan wrote. As you and I have both said, with the way the world works now Nate is within his rights not to want to found a cooperative, and Jonathan is within his rights to be surprised that none of his colleagues care about this like he does.
My point is simply this: Nate shouldn’t pretend that the model he’s proposing is or ever will become the kind of thing Jonathan is advocating for, because it’s not and will not, but I think Nate is pretending that.
From what Jonathan wrote, I also don’t think he intended to storm out. I think he intended to advocate for something, likely with enough frustration and emotion that others who disagreed with him noticed the intensity of his feelings, and they decided to exclude him from further discussions to avoid drama rather than ever engaging with him to give their firm final decision in a calm but explicit way. They weren’t willing to give him a clear final no and instead ostracized him as part of their implicitly stated no.
To be clear, I agree with your implication that Jonathan likely didn’t handle this in the way that would be best for his professional career going forward, insofar as he may not have been calm and diplomatic in his private advocacy and then went quite public with the level of venting we just read. But Nate’s response didn’t make him look good either; it felt as disingenuous as Jonathan’s earnest blog post may have been interpersonally unwise.
Personally I prefer earnest but interpersonally unwise over disingenuous, since it’s easier to fix with constructive criticism and emotional support. But I know a lot of investors and employers don’t feel that way.
I think Jonathan was disappointed because he honestly thought he was among like-minded friends, people he'd known and worked with for so long; he clearly didn't expect to be rebuffed so hard.
I've been in similar situations, and it's hard to stay professional in those cases. The feeling of personal betrayal is significant. Add to this that most old-school Linux hackers like him are often motivated by striving for social justice, and somewhat expect everyone who works with them to fundamentally wish the same things. Discovering that long-term collaborators actually wish to be regular techbros, must sting.
Yeah, a lot of different types of people get involved in this ecosystem, not only the stereotypical primarily altruistically motivated old-school hacker. This is especially true for the for-profit sector rather than among the purely volunteer part of the community.
That said, only some of them would be tech bro wannabes. Others might not want to try to rock the boat in this awful economy, in the sense of not wanting the career consequences of having been part of a failed attempt to form a cooperative when the company ends up capitalist in the end, or simply might be skeptical that a cooperative would succeed well enough to meet their genuine financial needs.
I am a Debian developer myself, though quite inactive for the last 6 or so years due to life circumstances. Plenty of people even in that world end up working for the man, in such forms as Google or Dropbox or the like, even if they’d rather not. Life is expensive and the world is capitalist with bills to pay.
Had to check, but it seems that KDE is "owned" (or legally represented and its trademarks owned by) a german nonprofit, KDE eV. Wouldn't there be a possibility for Riddell (or anuone in the community) to create a cooperative in Germany or any other part of the EU, just like the galician folks?
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.
Probably because he didn't have the capital. He's been doing KDE work for ages behind the scenes, but I don't think that made him much money. He hints at the fact that his professional condition hampered his attempt to keep his adopted kids with him, which would indicate he's not particularly wealthy.
If you don’t have the full story, how are you saying one side is gaslighting? Stop throwing around accusatory words.
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
> 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
Your average KDE contributor is an expert in at least two widely used technologies, C++ and Qt, and typically in several more. Purely KDE-related work may not be a huge employment market, but trust me it's not that hard for KDE folks to find work in general, and you will find them in many high places.
That is to say that contributing is definitely not putting you into any precarious career positions :-)
What is he even talking about here?
We never had workers rights at Blue Systems, we were all on self employment contracts. This will continue at Tech Paladin. It is illegal but unenforceable when done on an international setup. But employment rights are not a luxury you can chose to do without if you enjoy your job and want some more flexibility in your work day. They are fundamental and life altering rights that change people’s lives as I discovered when my adopted children were taken away from me. Nobody should be doing business with or taking money from Tech Paladin else be party to illegal workers rights abuses.
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.
Sure, but how the heck do his adopted kids factor into this?
Yeah, that part of the blog post wasn’t clear to me either. I assume that’s only clear to people with other context that wasn’t included. Maybe whichever agency oversees the welfare of adopted kids where he lives is more skeptical of the financial responsibility and solvency of tech workers with an illegally misclassified contract with an international client/payor than people with a locally recognized legal employment contract with proof of paying into the system?
Interesting, thanks. In the United States contracting so often just means that we have the same shitty job security as the full-time employees who are a little delusional about how safe they are, we occasionally have to talk about renewing the contract, and we get paid twice as much. There's no logic to it but it's not quite as awful as what's painted above.
What I said is even true in the US - employers have payroll and other compliance obligations such as their portion of Social Security and Medicare taxes, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation insurance, sometimes a state-specific requirement for short-term disability insurance, and often more. Plus health insurance and paid time off are usually part of the package for employees at least in the tech world, and COBRA rights exist after losing the job. Plus unionization rights too.
For independent contractors, all of those things are either fully the responsibility of the contractor (such as the Social Security and Medicare taxes) or absent entirely (such as the unionization rights). Whether that’s legal even in the US depends on whether the relationship is misclassified employment or true independent contracting. (These are among several reasons why true independent contractors charge much higher rates than people who just acquiesce to employer misclassification.) The IRS has a many-factor test based on the common law and is absolutely willing to hear reports of alleged misclassification. So are many state and local government agencies.
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.
I got distracted by the Quaker thing and went down a rabbit hole. But overall Jonathan seems like a decent person and major loss to KDE. Only thing I'm confused about is why he got shunned and I guess he had issues with his family too. Just about anything could explain that so I feel like that's a critical piece here but I'm not looking to violate anyones privacy or force them to divulge such information. Just something that could explain where Jonathan is coming from in all this.
I read Nate's response and it seems very hand wavy. Regardless hope Jonathan can continue doing what he loves somewhere else.
> But in the end I lost my friends, my colleagues, my job, my career and my family.
As a Plasma user and a part of a KDE team for 10 years at some time (in the past), reading this really breaks my heart. I hope Jonathan can find peace and healing.
I would encourage you to reach out the the friends you have worked with. Currently, this other person is controlling the narrative, and your friends may have been fed a very inaccurate view of what has happened.
Oof. I've had the experience of ex-colleagues, some of whom I thought had become friends, suddenly stopping all communication with me (In my case because I spoke up against mental and physical abuse against others). It hurt a lot. Hope surfing the wave helps.
KDE has done a great job keeping up a good desktop environment. They need to be careful not to let developers determine resource usage, as we got ksysguard replaced with an inferior System Monitor this way.
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.
It’s commendable to want to start a “cooperative socialist paradise”, you can pitch it and see if there’s interest with others. But it’s totally OK as well for others to not want to join that, and go the more conventional way.
It sounds like Nate is set on starting a conventional company, and that should be fine. The previous company apparently never made financial sense so it also doesn’t work to just continue that model directly and so things and people get cut. It can be both hard to communicate and to hear, doubly so when you’re emotionally invested. That’s why IMO it’s important to separate your self worth from your job at some level, for your own mental wellbeing.
Not to scaremonger, are we to expect some extent of software rot on KDE because of this change?
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.
For others who might not know, KDE Neon is a distribution. I was initially confused because I thought it might have been an alternative desktop environment to KDE Plasma.
This is probably the greatest curse and blessing of modern Linux: there are an impractical number of distributions. I guess you could probably say the same thing for desktop environments, various services, bootloaders, etc.
No. This is one person leaving.
End of the world? Finisterra in Galicia, Spain? That's in the Northwest past of Spain, facing the Atlantic. As you might guess, the currents and cliffs were so rough that the locals named the place "The end of the world" (Finis Terrae in Latin).
On KDE, the best for the project would be an inmutable distro with Flatpak.
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.
For GNU/Linux, Flatpak it might be if GNU promoted a trully FOSS repo; but they already made their own Flatpak with GUIX, and the inmutable distro it's GuixSD itself with Plasma.
On 'the ship already sailed', Gnome's performance it's really bad compared to Plasma.
GNU would never promote Flatpak, because Flathub isn't FOSS-only, and bringing proprietary software vendors into the Linux ecosystem seems like it was one of the goals of Flatpak into the first place.
> It was the turn of the millenium when I got my first computer fresh at university. Windows seemed uninteresting, it was impossible to work out how it worked or write programs for it.
What? There were plenty of books out by Petzold, Richter and Prosise.
> But in the end I lost my friends, my colleagues, my job, my career and my family. What’s a spod who just tried to do the right thing for society to do?
I don't see enough people reflecting on this, much less in the open source community. Props to the author for being so honest about it.
HN has a culture that is very eager to promote passionate computing, and I still consider that good thing. At the same time though, we put an immense amount of faith in technology, that "fixing" a problem in code or hardware will make it go away. It's a great religion for motivated tech workers, but also still a passionate lie. There are so many extenuating things that determine success and define your problem space, it becomes almost wasteful to sacrifice your personal wellbeing to "fix" a problem and renew your faith in technology.
This happens everywhere, in startups and open source projects alike. Take care of yourselves, people.
Nate sounds like the kind of person to lie to your former colleagues about you; I'd suggest reaching out to them to tell them what happened. Staying silent is letting Nate win.
prev: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45252463
Ah thanks! we've merged that thread hither.
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Shit move by Nate, but Jonathan did the right thing.