Well, if that make you happy, one of Nokia employees / that guys sponsored by Qt Software at Nokia, who work full-time into KDE Core Team, is David Faure. ;)

And, another merry guy is Aaron Seigo. :hattip:

I should continue?

Whose homepage doesn't mention Nokia at all. In fact, his CV specifically says that his presence on the KDE team is sponsored by Trolltech. Not Nokia.

If I remember right, Trolltech is now an Nokia subsidiary, known as Qt Software. I missed something?

Yes you did. It's entirely possible for Trolltech to continue to sponsor him even if Nokia stops sponsoring David Faure.

Let's go back in time. ;)

It was once, a company called Trolltech, who wrote and sell the libraries called Qt.

One day, the bad guys at Nokia have paid a disgusting amount of money, and they bought Trolltech, what is now a division of Nokia, nothing more, and it's called Qt Software.

Q: Who pays Mr. Seigo? :D

Trolltech, of course. That's what it says on his paychecks and on both company's record books. Which company produced Wall-E?

You have claimed that that all the money for KDE development comes from Nokia. You have listed two developers (out of a pool of far more than that) who are sponsored by either Nokia or its subsidiaries and said "should I stop there?". If you want to prove your point, then post a table showing the entire KDE core team and the sponsor of each member.

Very correct. But now, Trolltech is just a division of Nokia.

What will happen if Nokia decides to close this division, as unprofitable?

Logic would be the developers are fired, and Trolltech will disappear. And we get exactly to the topic of this thread. ;)

Then, David Faure, Aaron Seigo and others, will have to find a new job. So what will happen to KDE?

I don't believe Trolltech exists anymore (at least as a name) since it has been folded into Nokia. In any case, for what it's worth, here are the patrons of KDE: http://ev.kde.org/supporting-members.php.

What I don't know/understand is what benefit Nokia sees in supporting KDE other than promoting the use of Qt.

Nothing. The Core Team developers being sponsored by companies other than Nokia (and its subsidiaries) will still be there.

No, I say KDE's main developers are paid by Nokia. Of the thousands of KDE developers, a few dozen, most importantly, live from the KDE.

But I think that we should not argue on this topic. It is absolutely natural for this to happen.

There is a handfull of companies who pay OpenSource developers: RedHat, HP, Oracle, Novell, AMD, Intel, Nokia, Google, even Microsoft ...

Yes, this is the point we are discussing. Thanks for clarifying.

I doubt very much that the entire "KDE core team" (which is a management team, btw) is being sponsored by Nokia (or its subsidiaries).

It depends on how big the interest of these companies in the development's Qt and KDE ...

I can't see anyone than Novell and Ubuntu? which can be interested to support Qt & KDE.

A speculation would be that Nokia would have attempted to provide, through KDE4, an alternative to the Windows desktop.

There are a lot of fans of WindowsXP. A complete desktop with lots of nice effects and Qt4 imposing a in-facto standard for Windows applications should have been an appealing prospect ...

PS. If it seems surprising, in principle we can configure Windows XP to use KDE4 as desktop shell, although it can turn into a console system, which uses only the CMD.

I hope Slack reincorporates gnome one day. Until then, I'm quite happy with Slackware 13/64bit and added-back-in gnome (GSB).

I absolutely agree with you! :D

Given the prospect of marriage between Nokia and Microsoft, I think we should be prepared to not be caught with our pants down ... ;)