A few corrections about the transition from Blue Systems to Techpaladin

By now, many have probably read Jonathan Riddell’s blog post yesterday about his departure from KDE and the events that led up to it. And today, an article has been published in ItsFoss about the topic that unfortunately seems to have misunderstood some of the details of Jonathan’s post. I didn’t want to have to write this post, but since I’m named personally in both places, and there are inaccuracies spreading out there, I thought it would make sense to correct the record before this becomes too much of a game of telephone.

Overall it’s a very sad situation, and I want to make it clear that I bear no malice or ill will towards Jonathan. As for the internal details of the transition of many of Blue Systems’ personnel to Techpaladin Software, Jonathan is entitled to his interpretation of events, and that’s fair. But it was a delicate transition, and people also have a right to personal and professional privacy. As such, it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to get into anything non-public about individual people’s personal and work situations, motivations, or decisions.

So there are some parts of the story that are going to have to go un-told in public, at least by me. But I can correct the record about misunderstandings and errors, and offer my own perspective!

I’ll start with the ItsFoss article:

First of all, Jonathan never wrote in his post that he saw KDE itself “moving away from the cooperative and transparent model he valued”, or that decision-making was increasingly concentrated under me. Jonathan’s blog post wrote about his relationship with me in the context of the Blue Systems to Techpaladin transition, not about KDE itself. KDE itself is fine — better than fine, really. KDE is thriving, with competitive board elections this year and an increased base of donations it can use to assert a measure of independence from commercial entities.

It’s also not true that Techpaladin was “meant to continue supporting KDE neon after Blue Systems scaled back.” Jonathan didn’t write this, and it was never the case. Techpaladin was and is a vehicle to take over the contract work that Blue Systems had been engaging in, after its manager made the decision to discontinue that work. KDE neon was never a part of this.

There are also a few topics from Jonathan’s original post that need addressing. First of all, Blue Systems is not shutting down. I was just talking to a happy Blue Systems person at Akademy last week. As I mentioned, what actually happened is that Blue Systems divested itself of the consultancy element that it had picked up a few years prior. Blue Systems is still around as a company, and is still employing people who want to work there. Several people opted to stay there rather than moving over to Techpaladin. And at no point was I or Techpaladin ever Jonathan’s employer.

I also want to make it 100% clear that I never made any effort to shut Jonathan out of anything in KDE, never encouraged anyone else to cut off contact with Jonathan or shut him out of anything in KDE, and never pulled strings behind the scenes to make it happen without looking like it was happening. Nothing of the sort! If Jonathan came back to KDE, I would be happy to rebuild a collegial relationship over topics of shared interest.

Finally, regarding company structure and employment details, I went into this a few months ago in https://pointieststick.com/2025/03/10/personal-and-professional-updates-announcing-techpaladin-software/#comment-40233. Techpaladin’s current company structure actually allows people interested in making it more “co-op-like” to buy their way into partnership, which is how Igalia — the “cooperative socialist paradise” that Jonathan mentioned — does this as well. I’m confident that no laws are being broken here; I exhaustively researched the employment laws of 7 countries and then confirmed my conclusions with a lawyer before moving forward with anything. In addition, we practice financial transparency and cooperative decision-making on the topics of hiring, new contracts, etc. So internally it’s quite “co-op like” already.

But this is my first time co-running a company of this size and complexity, so I’m sure I’m making mistakes and can do better. Now that the company has survived the initial setup and been around for 7 months, there’s some breathing room to explore that. But from the start, the whole point has been to put money into the hands of people doing extraordinary KDE work that makes the world a better place, and to provide all of us with more agency over our KDE careers.

Hopefully all of this makes sense. If anyone has any further questions, I’d encourage them to ask publicly or privately, and I’ll do my best to answer what I can that doesn’t compromise anyone’s personal or professional privacy.