KDE the documentary

KDE: The Documentary tells the story of the pioneering open source community that gave computer users a free and open alternative to proprietary desktops like Windows.

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.

Along the way, KDE invented much of how open source communities organise themselves. KDE e.V., the non-profit association that holds the project’s legal and financial responsibilities while leaving technical decisions to contributors, became a model for many other open source projects.