The documentary film “The Story of Free Software Underdogs” has been published to coincide with celebration of the 30th anniversary of the KDE project. The film tells the story of the KDE community and includes memories of the leading developers at the origins of the project. The film also touches on the solution to the Qt license issue, rivalry with GNOME and the success of KHTML, which formed the basis of the WebKit and Blink engines used in Safari and Chromium.
KDE’s birthday is considered to be October 14, 1996. On this day, Matthias Ettrich, while a student, announced the creation of a new free desktop environment, aimed at end users rather than system administrators, and capable of competing with commercial products available at the time, such as CDE. The first stable release of KDE 1.0 was released on July 12, 1998, KDE 2.0 was released on October 23, 2000, KDE 3.0 – April 3, 2002, KDE 4.0 – January 11, 2008, KDE Frameworks 5 and KDE Plasma 5 – in July 2014, and KDE Plasma 6 – in February 2024. The GNOME project, which emerged 10 months after the founding of KDE, will celebrate its 30th anniversary on August 15, 2027.