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?
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."
UPDATE: Apparently it was a deal done months ago with the Blue Systems owner: https://pointieststick.com/2025/03/10/personal-and-professio...
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.
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
[0] https://pointieststick.com/2025/03/10/personal-and-professio...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
What? There were plenty of books out by Petzold, Richter and Prosise.
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.
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.
On 'the ship already sailed', Gnome's performance it's really bad compared to Plasma.