So the scope of this investment from STA is mostly focused on area which are underfunded in KDE, useful in a bit more corporate context while also being core components used by the rest of KDE and some third parties.
Wayland protocol development is fortunately already funded by Valve. And for the kernel work, this is something where KDE developers are very rarely involved with.
I'm one of the board member of the KDE e.V. I'm super pleased to see this news finally out in the public and that the German government decided to strategically invest in KDE and open source in general. If anyone has a question about this, shoot away.
And nowadays, PGP technology is mostly used by the government and military. I wouldn't be surprised if this was also the case when Bitcoins was originally developed
To be fair. Plasma BiScreen is now lead by Devin Lin which has done a amazing job moving Plasma Mobile once the initial sponsor of it turned its interest somewhere else. So i am quite happy to see the progress there :)
We do that in KDE too, where the decision to update to a possible gpl4 is decided by a vote of the KDE e.v. (the legal non profit organization behind the project) membership.
> History/Motivations This project started as an exploration of using AI agents for software development. Based on experience tuning systems using Abseil's B+tree, I was curious if performance could be improved through SIMD instructions, a customized allocator, and tunable node sizes. Claude proved surprisingly adept at helping implement this quickly, and the resulting B+tree showed compelling performance improvements, so I'm making it available here.
It seems the code was written with AI, I hope the author knows what he is doing. Last time I tried to use AI to optimize CPU-heavy C++ code (StackBlur) with SIMD, this failed :/
Honestly I think it's fair. Really the only people affected by this change are people creating proprietary forks, everyone else benefits from this change.
I just wish there was a way to ensure that the company itself doesn't do a proprietary fork.
Mercedes Benz is already for example using KWin from KDE as Wayland compositor and likely many other open source components. So this sort of move is not without precedent.
It's a smart move to do so instead of switching to Android Auto and loosing control of one of the most important component of the experience of the car.
The collaboration part is not that developed (but does exist based on Matrix as decentralized and end to end encrypted storage). That works very well is ticket extraction for hotels, train or flight + search for connection using public transport APIs.
Wayland protocol development is fortunately already funded by Valve. And for the kernel work, this is something where KDE developers are very rarely involved with.