Tech Over Tea - We Need More Paid Developers On KDE | Nate Graham

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

Nate Graham is back on the show once again, this time it's not to talk about KDE directly but instead his new consultancy firm that spawned off of Blu Systems and took over the Valve contract, known as Tech Paladin==========Support The Channel==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson==========Guest Links==========KDE Website: https://kde.org/Blogs KDE: https://blogs.kde.org/Tech Paladin Website: https://techpaladinsoftware.com/==========Support The Show==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson=========Video Platforms==========🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg=========Audio Release=========🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea==========Social Media==========🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345==========Credits==========🎨 Channel Art:All my art has was created by Supercozmanhttps://twitter.com/Supercozmanhttps://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. Welcome back to the show. Today, once again, we have Nate Graham on the show. I think this is your third? Fourth? It might actually be my fourth time, but at least third. Welcome back to the show. As always, pleasure to have you here.

You do great work in the KDE Project. I'm sure most people know who you are, but just in case people aren't aware, give yourself like a brief introduction. Well, thank you so much. It's great to be back here as always. My name, as was mentioned, is Nate Graham. I've been working on KDE stuff.

I do some development. I do a lot of bug triaging. I'm also on KDE EV's board of directors. And probably the newest thing in this introduction is I'm currently the CEO of a company called Tech Paladin Software that employs a bunch of KDE people. So yeah, I guess, where do we even start with this? I guess we can start with Where do we even start with this? I guess we can start with what is Techpal and like what, so you might have seen Nico's video on it, but I think that's pretty much the only mention it's had. I'm surprised he didn't get a Foronix article.

Usually Foronix covers like every random little thing that happens. Yeah, so I wrote a blog post on my website and I was also a little bit surprised that Foromics didn't pick it up. I wasn't upset about that but I was pretty much expecting it to happen. So Tech Paladin is an American company that does software consultancy for KDE-related software and it's in many ways kind of a spin-off or successor to part of Blue Systems. Blue Systems is the company that I have been working for for the last six or so, six and a half years, and late last year, the owner of Blue Systems asked me if I wanted to basically take over Blue Systems' largest contract. And after some thinking, I said yes.

And the net result of that was Tech Paladin, which is many of the same people from Blue Systems who are doing basically the same work, but it's just a different company structure. And that company structure is headquartered in the USA and is owned by me and David Edmondson, who's also very prominent in the KDE community. And we're all pretty much just working as the same team. With the big difference being that it's basically an employee owned company now.

Right now it has two owners. As I believe I mentioned in the blog post, I would like to broaden that in the future. But the idea is that this is like, this is our vehicle, our vessel for doing this work and contributing to KDE and offering value to the ecosystem and making everything better. Like we're, you know, we're on this boat that we kind of built together and I think it's

pretty cool. You mentioned that being structural differences between Tech Paladin and Blue Systems. Where is Blue Systems located and what sort of differences are there in that way? I know you can't get super into details of it, but stuff that's publicly available. So to be clear, Blue Systems still exists. I'm no longer working for Blue Systems,

but it's still there and still employing people, still doing things. I have a good relationship with a bunch of Blue Systems people. There's no bad blood here or anything. Blue Systems is a German company. It's a Gumba, which is the equivalent of a corporation. Tech Paladin is an American company. It is not a corporation.

It is an LLC. I don't know how much you want me to put you to sleep, honestly, because a part of this process has been learning like hundreds of pages of exceptionally boring, accounting and finance and company minutia. So you know, if you want to make this like something that you can put your kids to sleep with, I'm more than happy to talk about it. Go into it as much as you want to. I'm sure most people have not really ever thought about like tax documentation. What is the main income document in the US called? I don't know. W-14? Is that it? I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it's still W-14. We actually don't know. Yeah. That's the extent most people think about this. It's, we actually don't do that one.

So, Tech Paladin is an LLC, which means it's a state chartered construct and not like a federal thing. And it's chartered in my home state of New Mexico. And because it has multiple owners, it's taxed as a partnership. So it's not a sole proprietorship. It's not just me owning everything.

It's a partnership. And that partnership means that there's a built-in sort of line of succession. So, you know, if I get hit by a bus, David can take over. If, hopefully, if both of us get hit by buses at exactly the same time, which is not super ideal. There will be, you know, let's put a person as an owner.

But like, one of the things that came up during this transition was that a lot of former Blue Systems people really wanted an entity that was resilient, that wasn't owned by one person, that had internal accountability and multiple owners and an opportunity for other people to do that. And so that's what we ended up creating basically. And I think it was a really good idea and that feedback for me during the process was very valuable because that's what we ended up going with. And I mean there are, let me tell you one thing is that the tax accounting for a partnership is approximately 12 trillion times more complicated than the

tax accounting for a sole proprietorship. So it's, it's been quite a journey to learn how to how to do all of this stuff, you know, dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's and all that sort of stuff. But but was a good idea because it's really important to have a line of succession and multiple owners. It keeps the whole thing, I think, more stable and allows it to be more likely to outlive any particular person. You know, in a lot of the sort of media out there,

we're thinking about companies and corporations as these like artificial persons, and they're sinister things, and they outlive people. But if you're talking about a small business, that can be a really beneficial thing, because people come and go, but it's really nice to have a structure that outlives any of them,

because it means that that structure can be preserved for everybody else as well. It doesn't have to just disappear, go away, die, become unstable if like one random person decides that they don't want to do it anymore. And you know, being looking towards the future, I'm really happy doing what I'm doing right now. But I don't know if that's going to be the case in 10 years or 20 years. I can't make that prediction. Nobody can make that prediction. And so there definitely has to be a way for this company and its structure to basically outlive me if need be, either metaphorically or even

literally, frankly. I mean, it's a little bit of a macabre topic, but I think that's the sort of thing you have to think about in this situation, right? Like if all of a sudden I fall in a well and die, everybody else shouldn't just be completely screwed. That wouldn't be fair to them, that would suck. So that's how it's set up so that that doesn't happen. I did see one person in your comments mention,

oh, why is it an LLC and not a co-op instead? And you did make a good point here about the existence of co-ops in the U S. Um, if you want to like touch on that, um, yeah, I'd be happy to go over that. So, uh, I really want to create a co-op. One thing for anyone who doesn't know what a co-op is, explain that first and then go into the other part. Okay, so a co-op is, well one of the problems here is that there really is no definition of co-op.

It's a very loosely defined term. In some countries there may be an actual structure, in some cases there may not be, but the spirit of a co-op is essentially a worker owned company, where decisions are made democratically and ownership is spread around and that sort of thing. And I ultimately really want Tech Paladin to be a co-op. The challenge is in the USA there is no such legal structure as co-op, at least not at the federal level. At the state level, there are certain states that have created their own version of a co-op, but it's a very thin thing.

It's essentially a corporation where they recommend that you distribute shares in a certain way. I told you this was gonna put people to sleep. It's like, I can already hear people just like falling, their heads on their keyboards right now. But anyway, I'll press on in the hope that there are some finance nerds out there who are interested in this topic.

But basically, in the USA, in order to make a co-op, all you really have to do is distribute ownership and shares among the employees. Now the challenge is that there's a parallel set of rules in the USA and maybe other places. I don't know, but I know in the USA this is the case, is that you basically need to make things economically fair, which is to say, if you hypothetically have 10 people, and you have startup costs that are, let's say hypothetically, $100,000, I think I mentioned this in the blog post, and one person has $100,000, and the other nine people each have

$100, then obviously, one person is putting in a heck of a lot more money than others. So in the USA, the economically fair thing to do is to distribute shares equally. So the person who put in 100K gets 99.9% of the shares and therefore 99% of the ownership rights. The other people get a tiny share. Technically, this is a co-op. Now it's probably not what most people would think of in terms of a co-op. Now, it's probably not what most people would think of in terms of a co-op because even though everybody has some ownership, one person de facto

owns basically everything and can make all the decisions and is the decision maker. So it's not really a co-op in spirit, right? The way that you would make this a co-op in spirit is by saying, okay, we need $100,000. Everybody puts in $10,000. Well, that works great for the people who have $10,000 to put in and who want to put in $10,000, but not everybody does,

not everybody wants to. And so, you know, basically we weren't able to create a co-op where everybody needed to put in exactly the same amount of money because we had a lot of startup costs for this enterprise. I mean, it was a very, very significant amount of money. It's a little bit funny. Once you go into business, suddenly the numbers, the numbers start to get zeros onto the end of them. You know, when you're when you're buying things for yourself, for your house, for your family, whatever things costs are at a certain level. And once you have like

a payroll, and you're sending money out on a monthly basis, all of a sudden, the sums become unbelievably large. So, you know, we weren't able to make it like a full co-op with everybody having equal ownership and everybody putting in an equal amount of money, but we do have an internal mechanism for people who want to, to buy ownership. And that's a process that we have. David and I already have, as I mentioned in the blog post,

we're the owners, but other people can and will be able to, and there's a process for that. And like I mentioned, I would really like for that to ultimately be a thing that happens because right now our succession chain is two people. And two people is better than one person, but three people is better than two person, but three people is better than two people, and so on and so forth, right? So the more the more people there, the more resilient

it becomes, essentially. So that's an extremely long and boring answer for why not a co-op. Yeah, there is no such thing as a co-op. You make your own co-op, and the numbers just kind of didn't work out for us to be a full 100% flat co-op in that way. But one thing I will say is that the way the company is run internally is we kind of run it like a co-op anyway. I mean, I'm getting into internal matters here, and I don't want to do too much of that. But basically one thing that a couple of people told me when I was reaching out for advice and wisdom was be really financially transparent with your people. Tell them what's going on. Don't keep secrets.

Don't do back channel stuff. And so that's pretty much what we do. We discuss stuff internally. We have like a company specific internal organ business channel where we talk about like business decisions and should we do this? Should we do that?

Like what infrastructure should we use? Here are the numbers for the month. Like here's how we're doing. Here's how we project the next month to be. So like that's all open. It's not public because this is internal company stuff, but it's public inside the company. It's public to the employees.

It's public to the employees. You know, I don't want anybody to be left out. And from a selfish perspective, the more information I give to other people, the more I guess it seems like I'm actually doing something. Like I'm trying to actually continue to do KDE work too. I still do bug trash. I still do development. I'm still doing my KDE, EV board duties, but you know, I, I want to,

I want it to be clear that like all this super boring finance and admin stuff that I do, like that takes time too. It's incredibly boring, but somebody has to do it essentially. And you know, I'm doing it right now. And that's something that I'm comfortable with. Regarding countries that have a legal definition for a co-op, in Australia, we actually do have a legal structure called a cooperative, which does operate in the way you would expect a a co-op to operate. I think they were bought by some organization recently, probably during COVID, but before that, when I was at university, the main university bookstore here was owned as a cooperative business. During COVID, people weren't at campuses, people couldn't go to their stores.

So pretty much everything just shut down. But before that, yeah, they were also operating under that business structure. So here we actually do have that, but I couldn't tell you about most other countries. And I've heard from Felix in the comment section when he asked, he said that Germany has one. So I'm not, to be honest, I'm not completely surprised that the US doesn't actually have one of these that other countries do, but that's the way it is. Now, I know you can't talk about like most people that are involved in tech power, but you have mentioned specifically that David Edmison is

also a co-owner right now. For anyone who's unaware of what David's done and his work in the KDE project, can you just briefly explain who he is? So David is like a master wizard who can do anything. He's pretty incredible. If you have like a bug in KWIN or Plasma or anywhere, he can fix it because he can fix anything. He can do anything. And he's been a real technical leader, not only in KDE, but internally in our projects,

both in Blue Systems and now also in Tech Paladin. So I think it was kind of a natural choice for the two of us to join forces on this basically. Okay, fair enough. So when there's an organization, whether it be Blue Systems, whether it be Tech Paladin, what do these organizations actually do, right? Because I know people will have seen them or something like Igalia or Colabora, like all of these sort of serve a similar function, but I would imagine a lot of people

probably haven't really thought too much about like the relationship they have with the projects they get involved in. Yeah, first of all, our world is so weird. It is just a very strange thing, but in general, all of these companies are consultancies. They make contracts with other people who want work done on software,

and then they do the work on the software and charge the clients an amount of money, and then take that amount of money and then use that to pay the people doing the work, and then pay the people doing the administrative overhead, and then keep some of it as profit to put in their long-term reserves, or to pay back to people

as bonuses or pay back shareholders if there are shareholders, et cetera, et cetera. So that's a super high level overview of how all of this stuff works. Tech Paladin is no different. We are a consultancy like KDAB, like Agalia. We're a bit of a strange consultancy because it basically was spun off from Blue Systems, which was itself a consultancy. At the moment, if you go to our website, techpaladinsoftware.com, you can see our customers, our clients. Right now there's one. We have one client and that is Valve. And this

is basically the client that we inherited from Blue Systems. So in a lot of ways, it was basically a contract and a bunch of people doing that work who moved from one organization to another. And so those are essentially the terms under which we're able to do business. We have a contract with Valve and they pay us a certain amount of money to do things that they want done. You can imagine why, because Valve, of course, has the Steam Deck, and they ship KDE software.

So they logically have a vested interest in that software getting better. So they pay us to do that, and then we do so. We pay the people doing the work, so on and so forth. I say all of this very authoritatively using we with boring corporate language, but to be perfectly honest, we just finished our first month. So, you know, this is a very, very new endeavor. Like we have been for the last month, and I definitely hope we continue to do so for the foreseeable future. But we're a new small company

here. We're just kind of getting started. And it's been very exciting. I mean, the first month has been really fun, frankly. It's been cool, it's been fun. In a lot of ways, it hasn't been different at all because we're still basically doing the same work for the same people under the same terms. In some ways, it's been very different

because the whole structure around it has changed. It's a bit more nerve wracking because we're on our own now. But I've been having a really good time and I'm not going to put words in people's mouth and try to speak for anybody else, but you're welcome to have other people on and ask them and then they can tell you how awful I am and how terrible it is. Well, regarding it being like a new organization and this inheriting the contract from Valve, how long had Valve and Blue Systems been working together? I can actually barely remember, but a number of years.

Yeah, I know it's, I know it's for sure been a while. I've heard about this work for a bit, but I couldn't pin down how long I had been. It's been a while for sure. I honestly can't even remember the exact start date. And even if I could, I'm not sure I could tell you, because at that point it would have been internal Blue Systems stuff, but it has been a few years now.

Yeah, at least from what I can think of publicly, it would be most of the life of the Steam Deck. Sounds about right. Which I- when did the Steam Deck release? I always- I always like to go back and check these things just because it makes me feel uh older. Um like when did the Steam Deck release? It was like- Also a few years. Yeah, 2022 it released, apparently. Is that right? Yeah, OK, yeah, that is right. 2022 it released in North America.

It has been a while now, hasn't it? It has been. It really has been. So I don't know if it's out of the beta channel yet but I know that they did finally switch over to Plasma 6 which is nice. It's not publicly released yet but as you were saying in the beta channel. So yeah it's nice it'll be nice to see this this part of our work Get into the into that part of the public's eye. I mean, we're all very proud of plasma 6, of course I think plasma 6.3 is pretty great. And yeah, I hope I have steam deck users agree Yeah, the initial launch of plasma 6 was a little bit rough

It obviously nowhere near as rough as you know, you can go back and look at KD4 right? Like that's a that's a whole different beast. But obviously, you know going into Plasma 6 there were definitely issues. It wasn't really that... It's just Plasma does a lot of things. So there's a lot of things that don't get tested to the extent they should. It's like a weird combination of 30 different settings, like, oh, this happens to break because nobody's tested this one in a million combination of features. Yeah. And this is all on us, obviously. We should have much better testing.

This is especially true because we use QML, which is all runtime. And one of the curses of software that's interpreted at runtime is that you have more difficulty catching stuff ahead of time. There are ways around this. There's like a QML compiler. I'm definitely in favor of us using this more. But there were a lot of cases where, yeah, like despite how many people working on it, there were so many tiny corners of the system that weren't able to be adequately tested ahead of time. Even if things worked, maybe if they interacted with other things in a different way,

they stopped working properly. I mean, here's one example I can just think of because it's a bug that was fixed a couple of days ago. So it's actually on my mind. But we actually lost the ability to scroll wallpaper plugin pages. Now, this wasn't a problem because our existing wallpaper plugins that we ship don't need scrollability. Either they have enough settings that they fit on the page,

or they include their own internal scroll view because the top part of the page is like non scrollable settings and the bottom part is like a scrollable content view. So everything was fine, except when you use a third party wallpaper plugin that has like 900 settings on it. And then suddenly those 900 settings want a page

that's scrollable and the page wasn't scrollable. So you'd have to like resize the page to see everything. Oops, definitely a bug, definitely our fault. scrollable and the page wasn't scrollable. So you'd have to like resize the page to see everything. Oops. Definitely a bug. Definitely our fault, but like we missed it because it literally couldn't be seen without putting third party content into the system. So like the fact that you can put third party content into the system essentially acts as a stress test on it. So we fixed that recently.

Oops. Yeah. test on it. So we fixed that recently. Oops. Yeah, the one I always go back to is the accessibility bug that Richie's talked about a number of times, who recently got hired at the KDEV, which is cool, what's the official title? Accessibility... Accessibility engineer. Yeah. Yeah. The bug that I always like to go to is if you were zoomed in a really high amount and you had your monitors configured to be offset, so he just could not pan up to that bit, which most people don't use zoom in the first place and most people don't have offset monitors. So nobody even realized that was a thing that could happen.

I mean, on the subject of zoom, just to continue with how unexpectedly complicated everything is, uh, there are many ways to zoom in. You can do it with a keyboard shortcut. You can do it by holding down Control, Meta, and then scrolling with the mouse or with a touch pad. All those methods work fine except for the touch pad one. When you hold down Control and Meta and scroll with a touch pad, it does zoom in and out,

but it does so in like a really weird hinky janky way where it goes too fast and then too slow. So like it works in all the other ways, but that particular use case was not adequately tested and fixed. That also that got fixed today too. This is also on my mind because I was just like handling email and doing stuff for the weekly blog post,

which I'm also still doing. And I happen to notice that one. Yeah, Zoom's a really, it's a really important feature, but it's also really unexpectedly complicated feature. And this is something that over in Cosmic Desktop, they realized when they implemented Zoom, like they had a very basic Zoom initially. And then it's like, oh, if I zoom in too quickly,

compositor crashes. If I zoom out too quickly, compositor crashes. It changed the cursor size as you zoomed in, but it wasn't changing it in the expected order, like the expected sizing. So sometimes you would zoom in, cursor would get smaller, then it would get bigger and get smaller.

Big mess. But this is a problem that every desktop has. Like Gnome has a bunch of issues with it. Everyone has it. It's just the Pareto principle, right? The 80-20 principle, right? That 80% of the work takes 20% of the time, and then the remaining 20% of the work one has it? It's just the Pareto principle, right? The 80-20 principle, right? You know, 80% of the work takes 20% of the time, then the remaining 20% of the work takes 80% of

the time. I think it's this way for everything. It's not actually that difficult to have like a small proof of concept done or even basic functionality. But then you start to run into the edge cases, right? And you can pile edge cases on top of each other, because all of those edge cases come from basic usage. Like you were saying earlier with the zoom effect, the zoom effect is fine with a single monitor was, but then in that particular use case, when you put a second monitor on there

and you offset them in a certain way, all of which are supported features and basics features, simple features, but you combine all these basic basic simple features together and suddenly you have an interaction that is very unusual, even though each of them individually are usual, right? So honestly, that's what a desktop environment is. It's just like a giant combination of edge cases like that. And it's not just us too. I mean, if the next time you're interviewing a GNOME person, you know, and they've got an environment with fewer settings, ask them about this.

They'll tell you the same thing, right? Even without as many settings, it's the same problem. You've just got all these tiny little interactions that were not pre-expected. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay, let's get back to, um, back to TechPowellan. So, Yeah, you bet.

Right now, like the, the, the contract you guys have is with Valve, but as you said, with like the leadership of the company, uh, the leadership of the organization company, what have, what, what term do you want to use for it? Okay, sure. Um, um, okay. company would have what what what term do you want to use for it okay sure um um oh yeah yeah so there's like this chain of leadership with you and then david but right now you guys have a single contract and obviously i don't i don't see valve pulling out of development anytime soon like they clearly care about the steam deck they're clearly trying to keep this going but having a single contract obviously is a single point of failure.

Oh yes, this has been discussed quite a bit internally. We do want more contracts. However, there's this challenge, which is that, let's say we get another contract. Okay, well we're going to need some people to do work on that, right? If everybody's already 100% booked doing work on the existing contract, we need new people. If we need new people, we do some hiring. If we do some hiring, we haven't actually increased the stability of the company at all. Because if we lose that second contract, well, we probably have to get rid of those people who we hired. So, you know, the solution here is basically to dramatically, radically raise rates so that the amount of money that you're taking in is vastly more than is going out so that you

can kind of survive the loss of any individual contract. And we do ultimately want more contracts. One thing I'll say is that probably at this moment, the reason why I think we need more contracts is to have contracts denominated in different currencies. Uh, because right now we get us dollars from valve and those us dollars go back out to the people located in the USA, like me and any others. Uh, and there's no currency conversion involved there, but when any of that money goes out to people in other countries,

there is a currency conversion and currency exchange rates fluctuate. They don't stay the same. They're not nice like that. And sometimes when you have a president who decides to start a trade war with the entire world, your country's exchange rate doesn't do very well against other countries. So, you know, it's one of those situations where you need to diversify a little bit. Right now, we've only got dollars coming in. If we also had euros coming in, then we would be converting those euros, you know, back to dollars or else holding them in euros and then paying them back out. And either way, that is getting rid of that point of failure there. Because like right now,

I'm sorry, everybody, but like we're gonna have to get a little bit political here, because there's just an inevitable connection between business and finance and politics, especially especially in international stuff, but if the US dollar to euro exchange rate like absolutely collapses, and I need to pay, I need to spend like $100 to buy one euro, that's the end, right? There's no money. There basically isn't any money to pay anybody who needs to be paid in euros or pounds or Swiss francs or anything. So to a large extent, to run an international entity, you need to rely on stable currency exchange rates. They always fluctuate, but you need for them to be relatively stable in a certain realm. And what we're seeing right now today is on the recording date is April 4. And our third, no, it's third. I don't even remember what day it is. You know, this is the day that this giant trade war just

started. And it's not great for the US dollar, which means it's not great for anybody who gets paid in a currency, not a US dollar from money that comes from US dollars. So like, all It means it's not great for anybody who gets paid in a currency, not a US dollar, from money that comes from US dollars. So like all this stuff is interrelated in the end, even though technically the tariffs aren't affecting this business because we're paying for services and not goods. I mean, I don't know, that could change tomorrow. And regardless, what it has affected

has affected exchange rates. And those exchange rates are directly hurting all of us. I know it's kind of an awkward topic because we like talking about open source software here. But now we've gotten to companies. And companies need money to pay people so that they can live and pay their rent and eat. And in order to get that money, those companies need to be earning income and a profit.

And if some of those people need to be paid in different currencies from the money that's coming in, all of a sudden it starts to look very complicated. It inevitably becomes political. Like there's no way around it. There just isn't, right? And I wish there was, I wish that limitation wasn't there. I wish we could convert dollars to euros effortlessly

without any kind of fluctuation, but that doesn't appear to be the world we live in. And that's just one of the things that you kind of have to think about, right? Like running a business is all about risk. And one of the very specific risks that we face is this particular currency risk. And so that's one of the very specific risks that we face is this particular currency risk. And so that's one of the top reasons

why we're actively looking to get more clients, especially those in Europe. And when I say this, it's because we have an incredible set of people in this company. I mean, it's basically like all the people who are doing this awesome work in Blue Systems. There are a lot of big names who you've heard of before. And we have basically the talent to work on anything

KDE or Plasma related. And right now the company is very much a KDE focused company. So if somebody says, hey, I would like to give you a million dollars to write an evil AI powered restaurant ordering system that unemploys all of the waiters and waitresses and it needs to be in C++ and you're all really great at C++. Would you like to make lots and lots of

money by unemployed tons of people? I would say no thanks. Not unless you want to do it with KDE software, but even then, even if they said we want to build a KDE based evil AI, unemployed everybody system, I'd take it to the people in the company. And I would say, Hey, everybody, here's an opportunity we've got. What do you think we should do? Should we do this or should we not do this? And that would be a decision we'd have to make collectively because if not everybody's on board, if a bunch of people really don't like this idea, and we did it anyway,

how could we expect those people to be happy and productive? Like, it doesn't make sense. Everybody basically needs to be on the same page and agree on stuff, which requires talking about stuff, which requires getting people's input and buy-in and approval. So, like, I kind of don't think there's really any other way that you can run a company like this, other than letting the people have input over what goes on,

especially like a brain-based business, because this is a company that has basically no assets, right? It's like a bunch of laptops and like a dozen people's giant brains. Like those are the company's assets. My wife has been fond of saying that this this company is like an illithid cabal. We're like just like a bunch of people brains and jars doing stuff. Like we need the jars. I mean the brains. That's that's us. But like there's no real estate, you know,

there's no assets, there's no machinery, there's no factory. But yeah, just to get back on topic a little bit. Yeah, so if there's anybody out there who is like interested in sponsoring work on KDE software for their institution, especially if they're based in Europe, we would be very interested in talking because we have a lot of stuff that we can offer. And we're at this particular moment very interested in getting Euro denominated work. of an interest in, I know Germany's done so and a lot of other European countries, moving a lot of their government systems over to Linux, which I think is really cool.

That's a big deal. It's huge. That's actually really cool. It's definitely cool. Those are probably some future opportunities for us. I don't know how much I can get into that, but I can definitely say that it's something I would really like to see more of in general. I think it's great. And it's one of those things where the more that the more it happens, the more it tends to encourage other stuff, right? Like, if one province in Germany adopts a bunch of Linux and KDE software, then that sort that lowers the perceived scariness for anybody else who wants to do it because they can point over next door

and they can say, well, they did it over there in Baden-Württemberg. Maybe we can do it over here. And then Berlin says, well, maybe we can do it over here. Suddenly, it isn't scary. It's actually just like the normal thing. And then before you know it, everybody in public administration in Germany uses KDE software and we're all happy and it's awesome. Yeah, I've talked about this in regards to the Linux powered gaming handhelds, right? Like you have the Steam Deck first and it's cool.

It's the Steam Deck. And now you have Lenovo with their Lenovo Legion Go S that comes out, I believe in May. So now you have another company with their Lenovo Legion Go S that comes out, I believe in May. So now you have another company that's not related to Valve doing the same thing. And by having another company there, if that does reasonably well, it opens up the flood gates for other companies who might already have handhelds.

Like a bunch of them already do exist, but most of them are Windows powered and at least for now, uh Look Windows is just not it the the Windows shell is just not suitable for a gaming handheld. It just simply that's what I hear. Yeah That's what I hear. You're probably familiar with the old saying nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, right? Well, I am Really just tickled pink that it's becoming that way with, uh, you know, Valve and SteamOS and the gaming handhelds, you know, nobody, nobody ever got fired for going with SteamOS. Like it's just so funny. It's great. And so obviously we all, we all want more of this. I think it's, it's great for KDE. It's great for Linux. It's great for people because

they don't have to deal with Windows anymore. Oh my gosh. Yeah, imagine having a Windows handheld. You're playing a game and it's like, ah, Windows update time, have fun. Enjoy. Yeah. Stuff like that. Like there's no reason why Microsoft couldn't make

a custom Windows shell specifically for these gaming handhelds. Like the Xbox operating system is a modified version of Windows. It uses the Windows kernel at its core. They can do it. They just have to do it. I don't know. I don't really have any insight there, but all I can say is that their failure to do so in a way that appears competitive is to our advantage. And I think it's great that instead we've got Linux and KDE software on these devices instead,

because of course this gets into KDE world domination, which is what I'm all about. And hey, you know, we got to start with the gamers. I think that's a great place to go because gamers are like they're forward thinking, they're really interested in cutting edge hardware, they like to tweak their systems, they're after good performance, they tend to be like outspoken and thought leaders in their communities. So I think it's fantastic if we end up becoming like the gaming OS people, because where gamers go, other people follow in the same way that like developers and artists to write like, when artists use particular tool chain instead of

software, other people follow where developers do this, other people follow. And I think gamers are one of the, the poles of that tent, basically. Um, and if, if we end up in a situation where like, Katie has got gamers and we've got developers and we've got artists, like we basically won, everybody else is just going to follow after that. Yeah, developers is kind of the easiest one there. Developers have had for a while. That's, that while. That's all good. Well, to be fair, a lot of, especially a lot of older developers I've noticed,

like, tend to gravitate towards the Mac OS side. It's the older people and the really younger people. Like the older people who are around for, like, you know, when Unix was really big, they went to Mac OS because that was the commercial Unix. And then younger people because, you know, when Unix was really big, they went to macOS because that was the commercial Unix and then younger people because, you know, people buy Apple devices. But like, you still have a lot of developers who, even if they're on Windows, like they use Linux in the form of like WSL or if they use something else, they'll have a Linux server. Like Linux, it just it it makes its way into all of these systems matter what you do. It really does. It's definitely some strong market for Apple, too.

And I think we've made a lot of inroads. But frankly, I think where we've made the most inroads developer wise is among Windows developers. I mean, if you're a Windows developer, you're using Git in like WSL. You're running- I remember when before WSL you do Sigwin, which is very fun. Yeah, Sigwin, you're using Python, you're using CMake. Your entire tool chain is basically free software.

And Windows is just like the silly OS that hosts everything. But I kind of feel like we're in the middle of exterminating the concept of the pure Windows developer right now, because you can't use a pure Microsoft toolchain unless your only target is Windows as an operating system. That's just not realistic anymore. Even if you only care about Windows yourself, you might want a mobile app and then you need Android. And if you need Android, well, you can't just use Microsoft's tool chain anymore.

You're going to have to cross compile. You're going to have to use different tools. And if you're going to use different tools anyway, probably a lot of them are free software tools. And if you're going to be using free software tools, well, heck, I guess you better just use them on Windows as well. And let's face it, no matter what you were using,

you were probably using Git. So, you know, maybe you're doing Git for Windows, but it's the gateway drug. So I think we're well on our way to getting developers. Right now, we're in the middle of doing gamers. And then the next major pole of that tent is artists. I think KDE has made a really big push for artists recently.

There was a lot of brouhaha and kerfuffle about the Wayland transition, how this was supposedly terrible for artists. But the really interesting thing is, if you look at why it was supposedly terrible for artists, it was because the giant dot bat script of hacks to make everything work stopped functioning. But on Wayland, we can actually integrate everything

properly so that you don't need a huge hacky script to set everything up. We can just make it so that you plug in your tablet and it instantly magically works. And the eraser erases things. And you've got pen pressure. And you've got directionality. And you can put your stylus in mouse mode if you

want. And right now we're working on things like strips and dials on tablets and it's all just gonna, it's all just gonna work out of the box. And this is gonna offer a way better UX than X11 ever did. So I think just from like a hardware support perspective, we're gonna be getting there pretty close for artists. And then the next thing is really just software because of course artists are going to be bringing their specialized hardware, but they also want the software side to be really good. I know that it's really difficult to break the Adobe habit,

but it seems like Adobe is trying to get people to do that as fast as possible. I actually happen to have a lot of artists in my family. I married into like a family of artists. So I hear about this all the time. And like multiple people at family gatherings are complaining about Windows and they're complaining about Adobe

and they're complaining about software licenses and cloud services and AI nonsense all over the place. And you know, every time the conversation turns in this direction, I just quietly plant more of my little Linux and KDE seeds. And I think if we had better software support for a lot of stuff, it would be a no brainer in many cases. And KDE is already doing really well here

because we have Krita, which really is professional quality painting software. But painting is only one thing that you can do. There are a lot of other things too. And Krita can be used for other things. It can be used for photo manipulation. It can be used for other stuff. But it's not quite as like kitchen sinky as Photoshop is.

The two things we have that are like, there's more to be done there. Yeah. The two things we have which are like there's more to be done there Yeah Like the two the two things we have which are like business level a blender and critter when it comes to Like vector graphics like inkscape is good But it's not Adobe Illustrator. Yeah, that's really the thing is that there are holes, right? Like if you're a digital painter, we can say okay, you don't need Photoshop like you don't need a Coral painter you can just use Crayta and it's free. And it's awesome.

And it's fantastic. But yeah, if you're doing graphical, like vector illustration, or you're doing page layout stuff, the options are not quite as good there. So I think this is probably a niche that needs to be filled. But it really does seem like there's a lot of energy that is being spent on making the whole thing a more artist-friendly environment because that's very

important. Oh man, I'm just thinking about it right now. Once we got gamers and we got developers and we got artists, I think the rest of the world is next, honestly. So we keep, this is what happens with the show. We just segue off into random things and just like drag back. Well, you know, it actually makes a lot of sense. I know you wanted to talk about business and tech Paladin, but the reason why I think it makes sense that we keep branching off in different directions is because in basically every way, my vision for tech Paladin is that it's a vehicle to turbocharge KDE. My intention is essentially for this to be like rocket fuel for KDE as much as possible.

So all the stuff that has needed to get working that hasn't gotten working, we can fix that stuff. All the relevant features that need to be implemented, we can implement that stuff. All the relevant features that need to be implemented, we can implement that stuff. Anything that needs to be done, this company is a vessel for making it happen. And it's not just here. Like there's also KDEEV, which I'm on the board of, and I'm very involved in fundraising and hiring more people. I mean, you know, it's a little bit mercenary to be talking about money all the time. But like the more money exists in this space, the more people can make a

living doing work. And that's like, that's how stuff gets better, right? There's a certain level that volunteers will produce software at, and they'll do an incredible job producing software. But sometimes it takes people doing it for a living to either get to the next level or to go off to the side and do the boring stuff like making sure the CI always works and making sure bugs get triaged and making sure projects get managed and you know the stuff that sometimes it's a little bit more difficult to motivate volunteers to do.

And so, you know, I even though it's a company and it's a US company, I kind of see it as well. I don't see it as it is. It's joined at the hip to KDE. I mean, KDE's fortunes think what we're going to do is put as many resources back into KDE as possible for our own benefit, of course, because we want to continue to be employed and make money, but mostly so that KDE can get bigger and better. And KDE can expand as an entity and become closer to offering the value that every human being on planet Earth needs and deserves. And once we finally get there, we will have made a measurable difference in making the entire world a better place and fighting against the forces of crapware and insidification that are so incredibly prevalent and frustrating today. And that's why we do what we do, right? Because we're not satisfied with that.

We don't want stupid pop-ups all over the place. We don't want ads made by slave laborers and prisoners in China and Cambodia and being constantly spammed and scammed with stuff by those who are forced to do it for a living. It's like, have you read any of this stuff? There's absolutely horrific stuff going on with people being basically forced to scam others for a living. It's absolutely atrocious and awful.

But that's the kind of stuff that people need to live with today. And you go on the Google Play Store, the Apple Store, and it's like a wasteland. The software landscape there is a complete wasteland of people who are just trying to blast their app out to as many people as possible so that the monetization stream can give them like one penny per person multiplied by millions. And like this is not the right way to run a society, right? Having every individual person responsible for basically coming up with a scam that they can use to rip off everybody else so that they can finally have enough money to live. This is not the way to do

stuff. Everybody deserves better software. Everybody deserves free software that is high quality, that is amazing, and that they don't need to pay for so that their limited and precious funds can go towards the things that they do have to pay for. Everybody deserves high quality free software. And that's what this company is all about helping Katie provide. I didn't want to interrupt any of that.

You were just going off. I'm a little bit passionate about the subject. I can see that. Okay, so you know, it takes a company, right? Yeah. When I got started with KDE, my explicit goal when I got started was to help boost an open source project of some sort,

because I believed that I was barely even a Linux user. Like I'd used Linux and I had it hooked up to like my 3D printer systems back when I was running a 3D printer based business back then. Because at the time it was actually better to have Linux than Mac OS. Like the Mac OS systems didn't want to emulate serial ports properly. So they couldn't like the communication kept getting lost. Back in the day when you had to actually have your 3D printer plugged into a computer, those were like dinosaur days.

But at the time that I started using KDE, I really, I mostly just was looking for a community that would take me in because I wanted somebody that I could help to boost because I felt like the world needed a third option, right? We had Mac OS, we had Windows, we needed an alternative just like on a planetary basis. KDE was eventually the organization that took me in and I was arrogant and naive enough to actually believe that there was any chance this stupid goal of mine could get off the ground. But it seems like for whatever insane reason,

life has decided that this is the way it's going to be able to go. And we can help make KDE software used more widely and spread it throughout the whole world so that everybody can have the benefit of freedom and decency and ergonomics and usability. So you mentioned a number of times also being on the board of the KDEV. And this is like no new thing with you being in a consultancy firm and also being on the board. Like this was happening during Blue Systems as well. But what is the relationship between these like two entities? Because the KDEV, they hire people,

and you guys hire people as well. I guess you guys are the same person in this case. So there are many opportunities for conflicts of interest here. This is something we've discussed internally quite a lot. I've signed a new version of our conflict of interest forms and have already recused myself from a number of discussions but like it's the truth, you know hypothetically theoretically you could imagine a use case where I Push KDE EV to hire somebody to work on software that benefits my company

So that somebody else is paying for it and I don't have to pay for her, right? That's a potential conflict of interest You've probably seen that KDEEV has been hiring for plasma engineer recently. This is something that's been in the works for a while. I've been involved in that, but we've already decided on the board that I'm not going to be that person supervisor, for example. So there's not even the appearance of a conflict of interest where I could say, hello person, would you please work on this thing that makes it easier for people in my company to do work so that we generate more profits, you know. We're just not, we're not doing that, right? So I mean, I wouldn't do that and I don't want to do that. But like, in addition to the

existence of a conflict of interest, it's important to also prevent the appearance of a conflict of interest. Because the appearance becomes the perception, which becomes the reality in people's minds, right? So like, I have stepped away from that, and I'm not directing that person's activities. I'm not directing that person's activities. Another potential conflict of interest is what if a person in my employee wants to run for a seat on the board? I've already given this some thought. In that case, I step down from the board

because the conflict of interest opportunities there are unimaginable. This could not be overcome if I'm on the board and I've got a fellow board member, but I'm also that person's boss, technically. Like, I don't think this kind of thing can work. So I've already decided there, there really can only be like one person from this company or rather, I am not going to be on the board at the same time that anybody else from the company is on the board. Because like if two people from the company and not me end up on the board, that's probably fine because like their relationship is more flat to each other.

But it's just like too much of a conflict of interest for me to be serving at the same time that somebody I am technically signing the paychecks for is serving. But it's like it's a small world. This is a very small world. It's hard to avoid each other. And the fact that I'm on the board has definitely been like, it's been a thing to think about and talk about with regards to how I make sure that there's no appearance or existence

of a conflict of interest. I've been really happy with my time on the board, but I also don't feel like I need to be on the board forever. So like, if I run again this year and get defeated, that's fine. If somebody in Tech Paladin wants to run, I'll say, okay, then I won't run, that's fine too. Pretty much anybody there, I think say, okay, then I won't run. That's fine too. You know, pretty much anybody there,

I think would do a great job. So like, I'm not looking to, you know, climb every org and become like the president of KDE and take over the world with shadowy puppets or anything like, whatever, I don't need to be in charge of that stuff. It's fine. I'm not even in charge. Like I'm one of five, five people. The board has been really charge. I'm one of five people. The board has been really fun. But it's also, in a lot of ways, the board was actually good practice for running this company because it's just a lot of boring administrative stuff.

I think it's really easy to see it as this fun, sexy thing where you're in charge and you're making decisions and you're changing the world. But the reality is you're mostly responding to emails telling people that they should go to discuss.kd.org to ask for support for their software. It's a lot of that. It's a lot of looking at travel support requests

and approving or denying them. Most of it is very administrative in nature. And so it's fun, I like it. And there are opportunities to make decisions. And I would like to think that some of the decisions I've helped to make have been good for KDE. But, you know, a lot of it is just like kind of turning the crank so that other people don't have to basically. And that's exactly what it's like running a company to. Like this is a small business. This is not a big business. So even though technically my title is CEO, I end up mostly doing like a lot of financial and administrative and bureaucratic stuff. Like I call people up on the phone and I talk with them.

I argue with vendors and suppliers and say, hey, you charged us the wrong rate of interest for this thing. And you tried to to sneak it by us because you didn't put the rate on the contract. But then I calculated it out and found that you were charging a 7% instead of 3%. You said you were gonna be charging us.

Could you please send us a new invoice? It's just a lot of stuff like that, you know? Which hopefully I didn't make that sound exciting because it's not exciting. Again, to the finance nerds, it might be. I don't know. Maybe to the finance nerds. it might be, I don't know. Maybe to the finance nerds. I mean, I have to admit,

I'm a little bit of a finance nerd myself, but only like, only a bit. You know, I've tried to grow into this, but like there is just a lot of looking at numbers and invoices and spreadsheets and like interest rates and financial transfer services, like just a lot of nuts and bolts, you know? And that's honestly what it's like being on the board too.

Like you help to a certain extent, you help steer the ship, but to a large extent, you're the person shoveling coal into the boiler. Like you're kind of doing both at the same time. You're like, you're the captain and you're also the person shoveling coal into the boiler. And I feel like in tech politics, it's very similar to that.

How long have you been on the board for? 2 and 1 half years. It was 2020, late 2022, I think, or 2023. It's been 2 and 1 half years, because the terms are three years. And I'm up for reelection this year. Right. Okay. When are the, um, when are the, uh, elections happening? The elections typically happen at the AGM, the annual general meeting. Uh,

starting last year, we decided to decouple the AGM from Academy. So, uh, it's not going to be at Academy anymore. Last year, I believe we did the AGM about a month and a half or two months after Academy. The AGM date for this year has not been set yet, but it'll probably be around the same time. So I'm guessing, you know, fall, like maybe October, maybe November at the latest, something like that.

But that will be when the election is held. And it's not just me. There are actually two seats that are open this year. Adrian has already announced that he is stepping down. There will be one open seat. I'm pretty sure I'm running for re-election, unless anybody in the company decides that they want to run, in which case I'll step aside and let them do it.

And then there will basically be two open seats so the there will only be a competitive election in that case if more than there are more than two candidates which will be fun I think competitive elections are fun how have how have prior elections gone with like the number of candidates I know some organizations like really struggle with it. I believe OpenSUSA, I think they had nobody running. The FSF, they've had situations where they had... Oh no, free desktop. They had a situation where they had two seats open and two candidates. So I don't have a long history here, so I can't speak definitively about everything that's happened in KDEEV's history, but in the last couple years, the trend that we've noticed is that people don't generally

tend to get challenged. Like when people are up for re-election, often there are no candidates, and they just get all the votes because there's nobody else to vote for. But when they're open seats, then often those become a little bit more competitive and multiple people will step up and run and stuff like that. Two and a half years ago was a bit of an exception. I think it was a competitive one. So there were actually four candidates when I got elected.

There were two people who were running for reelection. And then there were two people who decided to challenge them basically. And one of those people who ended up on the board was me. But that was, I think, probably there are people watching and listening right now who know more than I do. But at least in my recent memory, that was a bit of an anomaly. I don't think we usually have trouble finding candidates when needed, but the K-2-E crew is such an easygoing crew. As long as people are doing

a great job on the board, I think they're pretty content to let them do what they wanted. I was kind of the exception because I also thought the board was doing think they're pretty content to let them do what they wanted. I was kind of the exception because I also thought the board was doing very good when I decided to run as a challenger. It wasn't because I thought they were doing a bad job. It was just because I thought, you know, I had ideas and I wanted to see if people were interested in my ideas. But it was not like a negative assessment of the people currently sitting there. I thought they were pretty awesome. And now that several of them, my colleagues on the board, I still think they're pretty awesome.

So, you know, if I stay there, then I'll be happy. If I end up either not running or being defeated, that's fine too, that's totally fine. Because Katie is still in good hands. I mean, everybody on the board right now is fantastic. And they do just an excellent job at everything that they do. They do a really admirable job steering the organization and keeping it on an even keel

and being conservative with funds and not like going off and doing crazy controversial things and making the org look bad. So it's just a good group of people really. I'm sure there'll be, um, I'm, I'm sure you'll have a blog post when the, uh, when the elections happen anyway, or they'll, they'll be, they'll this, there's no shop for one. It doesn't cover. This is all public.

So I'm sure we'll find out, uh, how many people are running, who's running, uh, how it ends up going. Um, sometime later this year, I'm sure we'll find out how many people are running who's running how it ends up going Sometime later this year, I guess Sometime later this year, I think that's right So one thing I want to ask about is the the name tech paladin Why I know you've used that in the past mentioned with I think in the post there was tech paladin printing in the past as well Why is this the name you've gone with? Because it kind of feels like this is just the name you just use for things. So there's one thing I want to correct.

My gamer tag is not Tech Paladin. That is not my login for all of my accounts. I know you said that on a live stream at one point. So it's definitely not. It feels like it. Yeah. It's actually just business names. I mean, in general, my login is always like pointed stick coiniest, right, right, right, right. Which is a money

Python reference. But tech Paladin is it was my wife's description of me many years ago, when I decided to start this 3d printing company, and I couldn't figure out a good name because I'm terrible at naming things. She suggested that because according to her, that was like the best version of me. And at the time I was kind of struggling with things. I was going through some dark times and frankly, I was not the best version of myself back then. I was kind of an asshole in a lot of ways, to be perfectly honest.

I believed a lot of really ignorant things. I hurt a lot of people around me and damaged a lot of my relationships. And I was just sort of starting to maybe get a little bit better. And so I think when I asked my wife for an idea here and she suggested this idea, it was her way of kind of encouraging me to go back towards the light side, so to speak. She was like, this is the best version of you. So you could name this company after a positive thing. And I like that. And the fact that I named my first company after

that, I think was actually helpful in me turning away from the dark side and turning back towards the light side. And when it came time to start the second company, I just decided to reuse the term because I mean, I thought it was an okay term. Maybe people think it's stupid. That's fine but I Like the reminder I like the reminder of you should be good You know because if we're talking about paladin in the D&D sense paladins are lawful good. That's their alignment You know, they're never chaotic good. They're never lawful neutral They're always lawful good.

And that's my ideal for myself. And that's my ideal for the company, too, that we should be lawful good in our alignment. And so I like the reminder. I like the reminder that we're doing this because we're good people and because we want to be good people and because we want to see good flourish in the world. We want good and we want law and we want to be good people, and because we want to see good flourish in the world.

We want good and we want law and we want order, and we want decency and we want kindness and we want freedom. We want all the good stuff that everybody wants. So it's just that reminder. Now, before the D&D nerds show up, actually there is an Oathbreaker Paladin. Ah, it didn't count't count at the prestige class.

Doesn't count. There's also the blaggard, but that doesn't count either. They don't count. They don't count. Just had to bring that up since you did specifically mention D&D. I mean, I'm a huge nerd and I play D&D, so, you know. Well, I have. It's been a while for me. I'm actually a stupid nerd because I'm the nerd who actually thumbs his nose at D&D and says, well, I don't think the system is actually the best system. I prefer D10 based systems where you gather dice pools. I'm a big fan of the White Wolf systems personally. That's my stuff.

That's my jam. Yeah, my, the thing that I mainly played was back in 3.5e. It's been a while since I've played some D&D, but some friends are setting up a campaign. So, you know, it'll be nice to get back to it for sure. It was fun back when I had, you know, when I was in high school and you could spend eight hours doing literally nothing and don't have to think about it. Yep, that sounds like my high school experience as well. I did that. I did get to play in a really fun campaign recently where everybody was a changeling, but I was a vampire

and they didn't know that I was a vampire. And slowly they discovered that I was a vampire and I joined them and we pooled like our changeling and vampire skills to defeat a bunch of other vampires who were bad. It was actually really fun. Anyway, this is like very far off here. Yeah, we got way off topic here.

So, oh, one of the things that I did see mentioned Um... So... Oh! One of the things that I did see mentioned in the blog post is the organization being set up in the US, which obviously makes sense because you know, you're in the US and this is the structure you maybe don't understand initially, but it links into some of the stuff

you may have already known and obviously, you know, you've already mentioned the potential instability of being in the US and then you still have the US contracts. There's still going to be that, but just the organization itself being situated in the US and potential to move it at some point in the future. Yeah, I think it's a legitimate concern to bring up, frankly, like I replied in the blog post. These are the kinds of questions we need to consider in this day and age.

I think the obvious elephant in the room here is that the country that I live in is sort of disintegrating as a paragon of law and order and a country that people admire. And that's pretty bad. That's bad in the abstract. And it's bad for the prospect of a stable business environment. So like I said, I set this business up in the United States because that's what I know how to do.

But I mean, if we need to move to Europe in the future, we'll move to Europe in the future, or we'll move to the UK, or we'll move to Australia, or move to somewhere. One of the benefits of this business being a bunch of people's giant brains is that we're very, very mobile. Like, there's nothing to move. And I think you can see this in the fact that we moved already from Germany in Blue Systems to the United States. This was, quote-unquote, just a matter of setting up a new form and hiring everybody and moving the contract over. I mean, that sentence obscures several months of incredibly complex negotiating and planning and implementation. But, you know, if it was done once, it can be done again. Fundamentally,

all this stuff is just words on a page. Like companies don't actually exist. They're legal fictions we created. They're just ideas. And you can like get rid of one idea and move that idea to a different country if you need to. And if we do need to do that, we'll do that. I personally don't know how much help I will be at running or being like the finance person of a company in a different country.

So if we do move, you know, I might ask somebody else to take the lead on that and see if anybody else wants to be in this position that I'm in right now. And maybe I can help them out, but I wouldn't be probably the most competent person to do that. So I mean, like I've said a bunch of times, this team that we've got in tech Paladin right now, like we're a team. Right now, I'm the person who knows how to run a US

business. If we move to Germany, maybe one of the Germans runs a German based business, and we structure it that way. Like, we can move, we can do that kind of stuff. It's actually pretty cool really that this business can kind of like bamf across borders as needed. And I really hope my country doesn't disintegrate and that it doesn't become necessary

because I think it'll be really hard and difficult. And frankly, if at that point we only have money coming in from the United States, it's not that big of an advantage anyway, because we'll still be subject to like, potential US-based instability. But it's one of those things that you need to have contingency plans for

when you make a company. You can't just assume that everything is gonna work out forever. You need to plan for shocks and outside events that could disrupt things. And we've done some of that already. We're prepared to do more of it. But it's like they say, may you live in interesting times. I feel like we live in interesting times right now. And I would probably prefer not to live in interesting times, but I don't have that choice. We do.

We live here. And we're all just doing the best we can to make the best of Western civilization, going through a very stressful and traumatic period led by my country trying to take everybody down in a murder-suicide pact. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, you can't avoid the politics here. You really just can't. Like, when you're talking about a bunch of volunteers doing work on software that they don't need to make money from, you can avoid the politics to a somewhat large extent.

Like there still is politics, but you can avoid it. But when you start talking about money and employment and cross-border transactions, there's politics. There just is. There's no way around it. Sorry, folks. Yeah, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's annoying that you have to deal with it. Uh, it would be nice if everything was just like nice, stable, everything was just like good. But you know, there's no point sitting around just whining about the way the world is. It's not going to change, so you got to deal with- Well, the hope of it changes.

I really do hope it changes. But you're sitting around whining, is it going to change it? It's like, this is the way it is right now. So I could just sit here doing nothing and just complain about the world, or I can work with what I have and make the best of it. And that's what we're all doing here. You know, as it's kind of funny because like this whole situation started almost around the time of the presidential election in the USA. And so even as all that was happening, we're all like lying around on the couch depressed and like wondering what we do next. And like a little bit after it became clear that sanity would not prevail, I just found myself thinking, you know what, I can't afford to be upset about this. I have a task in front of me that I have to do so that we can all continue to work together in some capacity.

And I tried to block out what was going on in the real world for a while because I couldn't let that distract me, basically. And even now, I try not to do too much. I work on what I work on and I do KDE stuff and I do work stuff. And then every couple of days I'll say, huh, I wonder what's going on in the world. And I'll open some news websites and look at some headlines

and I'll say, oh wow, all bad. All right, that's enough of that for now. I'm done. Honestly, a much healthier way to look at it than, um, again, like you can't, you're like, you sitting there worrying about stuff, isn't going to change anything. So rather than stressing yourself out about the way things are in the world, um, regardless of what country you're in, whether, whether you're in the US, whether you're in anywhere else, like you're in anywhere else, like, you're not, like, you worrying about the price of eggs, worrying

about the price of houses, worrying about house prices here are really bad. If you want a good example of how bad they are, go look at Canada's houses. It's basically that. Um, yeah. So that's fun. I mean, that's the thing, is like stuff kind of sucks everywhere, right? It feels like the whole Western world is going through a very difficult period right now.

We're all struggling with things. I know the USA is this massive political situation going on right now, but there's all sorts of sort of scary stuff happening in a bunch of European countries too. And we have our cost of living, the UK has a cost. Oh, oh, something happened. I don't know. And now there's two of me. That's fine.

There are two of you. That's interesting. That'll go away. Well, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I think we were talking about how you can't just like, lie around and mope about stuff. Because there's no matter how bad things are. And things can be quite bad. There's like like there's always something you can do about it maybe you can't change it and maybe you can't stop it but there's something you can do to react to it to try to protect yourself from it um and if there isn't well i'm i'm sorry that sucks um in that case i guess you

just kind of have to have like a zen attitude about it. And like realize that sometimes life happens to you. Yeah. But, you know, here we are, you and I, you know, people in first world countries, like we're extraordinarily privileged, despite how, you know, how annoying some stuff is, like, oh, housing is too expensive, eggs are too expensive, the currency exchange rates are fluctuating too much. Like get real, our lives are great. Like we have people like you and I, we've won the cosmic lottery.

Yeah, I don't work in a Google line. I feel like it's up to people like us to have a little bit of humility about that because as much better as things could be, if you've got an internet connection, if you have a job, if you have a house, if you have like relationships and a community, like you've won the freaking lottery, man.

And you have and I have, and probably a lot of people watching have like, as bad as things in the world seem and as bad as the headlines are, we're all incredibly fortunate people. And I think it's important not to forget that. Like the fact that we're here, we're talking about open source software, right?

Like this is already at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. This is the self-actualization tip of that pyramid. Like I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that nobody watching this show is worrying about where their next meal is coming from. And if you are, well then stop watching the show and like, Oh my gosh, like fix that because you're going to die. That's really bad. But pretty

much all of us are incredibly privileged to be where we are today. So we just got to remember that we got to count our blessings. Like. Like in times of strife like this, when everything seems bad out there in the world, we just gotta remember that like our little circles around us that we can control, that we're within, like those are still pretty good. There's stuff there. Like all is not lost, you know?

I would like it if, you know, rule of law appeared to be stable in my country. But I'm going to have to content myself with the fact that I have a beautiful, wonderful wife and two children and I get to work on open store software for a living, which is like, you know, an incredibly blessed, privileged position to be in. So, okay, stuff out there is bad, but like, I'm just incredibly grateful for the stuff that I do have. And I think we all have to refocus on that a little bit. Right, like none of us are working in like a cobalt mine in the Congo, where you're carrying

a baby on your back and you're breathing in cobalt dust with no masks on or Working one of those Working one of those sweatshops in China where they have nets around the building so people don't jump like yep You're not in that situation. It could be a lot worse. It really could be like it could be better But it could also be a lot worse and frankly it could probably a lot worse than it could be a lot better Like even in your own country like you're not living in 1800s US where there's no there's no sewerage system Horses are crapping all over the street people are just walking through dung everywhere they go and everything

If you will are worried about getting poop particles on their phone Everything's a poop particle if you're Things a poop particle that's I think that's gotta be the tagline for this episode everything's a poop particle so with having With having a family with being on the the board with being at at Tech Palace And how do you actually find time to do any of the technical work? Good question.

It's hard. It's really difficult. Part of it is that a lot of the work to set up this company was sort of front loaded. So it still requires work and attention and stuff, but the actual day-to-day management and maintenance is not that bad, especially at the beginning of the month, we're paying invoices and stuff.

There's a lot of accounting and stuff. But next week, probably there won't actually be that much day-to-day. And eventually, I do want to start focusing on more high-level things, like going out and advertising and getting new contracts, especially in Europe and stuff. But especially for the first month,

I think we've all sort of focused on trying to just launch this thing and get it off the ground and make it as stable and have continuity from what we were doing at Blue Systems to make sure that this is actually something that we can do, you know? Because, I mean, I'm sitting here talking about this company, this and this company, that, this company is like a freaking month old.

It's not actually a long lived thing. Like we're all still kind of getting it off the ground. And I think we've succeeded in our first month, but it took a lot to sort of get to that point. And you know. Right. Like you haven't even dealt with a single tax year yet. It's really, really young.

Exactly, yeah. And I've been doing all the accounting, thinking about taxes. Like, oh gosh, I read so many tax publications. So I know much more about partnership accounting and taxation than I did before, as well as corporate and sole proprietorship accounting and taxation, which are a little bit easier in some ways. But yeah, like it's new, it's young. As for where I find the time to do technical stuff, I mean, to be honest, I don't actually

find it that difficult because my company CEO tasks don't take up a huge amount of time. Like they really did months ago, but now they kind of don't. And eventually, I want to ease into them taking more time because I'm behaving more like a CEO, finding customers and stuff. But even then, those are just like calls and things. So it's not that hard. In terms of board activities, I don't know.

It's just like each one of these tasks that I have to do, they take time, but you can find a way to minimize the amount of time they take by being really efficient and also saying no to certain things. Like there's always FOMO, there's always the fear of missing out. You want to be subscribed to everything. You want to review everything. You want to look at everything. You want to develop everything. You want to say yes to every email, but sometimes you have just got to say no. And I found that I can scavenge some time by being a little bit more brutal with how I spend it. But I will also be honest about like, I couldn't do this without my wife. She's been an incredible partner for this crazy journey that

we've been on. She does a ton of stuff with the kids and around the house and is an incredible mentor and partner for me. So I rely very, very heavily on her to help me throughout the day and stuff and just like dispense wisdom. So that helps. Without her, I probably would not be a very wise person at all. And the thing about wisdom, just to get back to D&D a little bit here,

is that wisdom and intelligence are not the same thing. Intelligence is like, what's your IQ? How well can you do on this test? How much can you think? But wisdom is, are you doing the right thing in the first place? And if you've got intelligence without wisdom, you'll probably succeed at every intellectual task you undertake, but you might not do the right tasks. You might waste a lot of time doing the wrong tasks. This used to be me,

and frankly, this is still me in a lot of cases. But like my wife has taught me so much wisdom and how to distinguish what's worth doing and what's not worth doing. And let me tell you, you know, having like, she's sort of my superpower in that way, because I don't waste anywhere near as much time as I used to on stuff that doesn't matter. And you save a lot of time just by not spending it on stuff that doesn't matter. Really? That's pretty much it. And the other mundane answer is like, I don't really have hobbies. I kind of do KDE. Like KDE used to be my hobby, and then it turned into my job, then it turned into my whole life. Like I'm lucky if I get like three or four hours of video games on a weekend or something. Currently playing Endless Space 2, which is really awesome. It's made by Amplitude Studios, which makes Endless Legend and Human Kind. I've seen this. Yep, yep, yep. Yeah. I bought Humankind a couple of years ago, and Humankind is like a civilization competitor game, which is pretty good, but frankly,

their earlier games are like mind-blowingly amazing. If you like 4X games, yeah, which I do, I'm really enjoying that, but like, I'm very, very fortunate if I have a couple hours to play a video game. So, you know, I don't have a lot of hobbies really. That's basically it. I also don't really exercise, which I should. I actually just bought myself a treadmill to go on my standing desk so I can walk. So I don't actually have to spend additional time exercising. But like, yeah, no hobbies. No exercise. Those are some of the sacrifices that that I've made in order to do the stuff that I do. Random side tension, have you seen that video of Linus Torvalds with a standing desk and

a treadmill? He talks about how if you- He talks about how- Yeah, it's like a 10 year old video. He mentions if I have it going any more than like one kilometer an hour, I can't tie from the keyboard because things shake too much. Interesting. Maybe I'll find that too.

I bought it and I have it, but I haven't assembled it yet. To be fair, the desk he's using looks like an Ikea desk. Probably. Yeah. Probably. Yeah, I mean, the thing is like, I couldn't sustain this if I didn't love doing what I do. Right, right. You probably you know, you heard a little bit earlier when I just went completely mental off on that screed about how the world needs KDE and stuff. But like, that's how I get up in the morning and have the energy to do these things is because I just believe really passionately that the world needs KDE software and free software in general because like, it's just

important it's necessary. And if I didn't believe that, I don't think I would have the energy to do what I would do. I would get really tired really quickly. And I would like find excuses to slack off and cut corners and you know, all the stuff that that normal people do at normal jobs, right? But I need to get back to what I was saying before. We're the most fortunate people in the world. I have been gripped by a sense of mission, and I actually have the ability to do something with that and make a living doing it.

I'm the freaking luckiest person in the world. And I count those blessings, but to a certain extent, it's like, I don't want to squander that. Like, because I've been given all of these ridiculous blessings in life, I have a duty to make something out of that too. Like, I can't just sit on my butt and play video games when I could be spreading KDE software around the world so more people can experience freedom. Like, of course that's more important. And sure, when I get super tired and burned out, I need to play a video game for a few hours so I can recharge my batteries.

But then it's back to the mission because the mission is what matters. That's the thing that really animates me. In the end, when I'm moving little spaceships around on the screen, it's fun, but it doesn't actually exist. It's giving my brain little hits of dopamine, and I'm enjoying it, and I'm relaxing, and I'm recharging my batteries, but it doesn't actually exist. Like it's giving my brain little hits of dopamine and I'm enjoying it and I'm relaxing and I'm recharging my batteries,

but it's not actually making the world a better place. And I've got the mission that does make the world a better place for me. You know, that's, I'm like a crazy workaholic person. So that's just like how, that's how I see it, you know? And I'm not dissing video games here. I'm not saying like how, that's how I see it, you know, and I'm not dissing video games here. I'm not saying like nobody should play video games, but like for me, they're like, they're a way to recharge my batteries when they're running on empty, you

know? No, we need people like you. Like that's very important. If everyone just look, I, I, I, I play games on the weekend, like, but here's the thing. If everyone just played games all the time, you see people who, they come over from work and it's just like, that's all they do. They don't have any other hobbies besides that. Like I try to keep it on the-

At this point, it's part of your job too, right? Like a lot of people make money playing video games. I don't make money on the gaming channel, but like- Okay. Maybe at some point, that would be don't make money on the gaming channel, but like, okay. Maybe at some point that would be that would be nice. Yeah, but you'll should donate like subscribe donate to his channel. What's your what's your Patreon? Um, but like like people like you who this like determined and this like

focused on making things good like This is how we get some of the amazing software we have, right? Like you don't get some amazing, look maybe something weird happens. You don't really get amazing software from someone who works on their code base like three hours a week here and there,

like when they feel like it. Like yeah, over time maybe you'll get something good there. But the things that you see that, you know, when you see a project that really pops off, really like starts getting attention, it really starts doing good, like this is because someone is super determined with it. Whether we're talking, you know, W.L. Roots. This was started by like one guy who was very determined to make a Wayland library. Or you wanna talk about, you know, even just like the way that Katie and Ghanom start, like both of these projects early on were very, very small

by a small, like a one person or small group of people who wanted to make something that was better than what was available at the time. And like that, that's how you make these things happen. That's exactly right. There's this Steve Jobs quote that stuck with me over the years, which is he once said, if quality was a matter of cutting a check,

then Microsoft would have good products. And I love that one because it's so true. Ultimately, you actually can't really motivate people with money. People need money to live and to pay the rent and to finance their hobbies and save for the future. But at a certain point, people have enough money and you can't really motivate them that much by giving them more.

Maybe you should because they're worth it or because the company has extra money or because they really kicked ass and they earned it. But it's kind of about people being passionate about what they do. Right. Like to a certain extent, the money needs to be a reward for passion because it can't serve as a motivator on its own. I don't think most people who want to do good things are really motivated by money. Like maybe Wall Street hedge fund traders are motivated by money, but like they're trying to destroy the world.

So I don't count that. But you know, you have to, like you can move mountains when you have passion. It's true for everybody. Like within all of us is a passion for something. And once you find out what that is, you'll figure out what your life's purpose is. And this is true for something. And once you find out what that is, you'll figure out what your life's purpose is. And this is true for me. It's true for you. It's true for you, watcher, listener.

You, who are paying attention to this right now, you also have a passion that's inside of you. Some of you have found it, and some of you may not have, but it's in there somewhere, I promise. And if you find it, your whole life's direction will become perfectly aligned. And you can tell, you can tell when it is. I used to actually work for Apple myself. I worked there for seven and a half years. It was my life's dream. When I was a kid, I loved Apple and I wanted to work for Apple. It was my dream to work at Apple and I worked for Apple. And for those seven and a half years, When was that? When were you actually working there?

This was between 2009 and 2016. Okay, okay. So a few years after the iPhone launched. Okay, cool. A few years after the iPhone launched, I actually worked on the iPad internally and helped to launch it. And the Apple Watch 2 and some other stuff. I was not a software engineer, I was a build engineer. So I was like turning the crank on the build system, which sort of gets me to my next point, which is I started out as a build engineer, which is a very entry level position. And I stayed at that entry level position for seven years. As colleagues of mine advanced and got promoted and

became software engineers and became managers, I stayed at the same position for seven years. And I didn't quite know what was wrong, but it turned out that wasn't the place for me. My life wasn't oriented properly. I thought Apple was my passion, but it turned out that it wasn't. And that was why I was stuck in an entry-level job for seven years. And then after I left Apple, I got another job. And then during that time, I found KDE. And I've now been doing KDE stuff for eight years, a little bit more than I've been doing at Apple.

And the trajectory of my life and career in that same block of time, about eight years, has been so radically different compared to at Apple because now my life is oriented in the right direction. I'm working on something I'm passionate about. I love it. And it's like, it's my whole life. And the same amount of time I spent at Apple didn't really amount to a whole lot because I wasn't pointed in the right direction,

hadn't found my actual passion. I kept thinking it was my passion, but life was telling me, this is not your passion. And eventually I found KDE and it was like, oh, that's what it was. That's what it was all along. And it's there for you too, you know? It's there for everybody if you're stuck. If you feel like you're stuck in a dead end job, you know? It's there for everybody, if you're stuck.

If you feel like you're stuck in a dead end job, you don't like what you're doing, or you feel like it's okay, but maybe you could do more. Like that's your brain telling you that you're actually not in the right place. And it'll probably be risky if you leave and you try to do something else, but you have to, because if you don't, you're gonna be really disappointed later.

And once you eventually do, you'll say, oh my gosh, why didn't I do this years earlier? I promise, because once you find it, once you find what you're passionate about and what actually does it for you, everything gets better, your whole life changes. So, I'm sounding a little bit like a motivational coach here, but I think it's really important.

Those of us who are in this movement, everybody watching is somebody who cares about free software. None of us are here because we've been paid to do it. All of us could probably like anybody working in free software could probably double or triple their salary making missile guidance systems for Raytheon Like we're all here because we love free software And so I'm I'm talking to all of you because you're all passionate You're already passionate about stuff So like if you feel like you're stuck doing something if if you're frustrated, if you're just like watching the news

and you hate it and you think the world sucks, like it can be better, it really can. And that's ultimately how I think we make the world a better place, not by like forcing it to be better, but by living our own best lives and encouraging other people to live their best lives. Because ultimately, all the yahoos out there who are trying to destroy civilization, they're only doing this

because they're afraid. They're angry and they're upset and they're afraid. They don't know what's going on. They don't understand what's happening. They're fearful for their jobs. They're fearful for their lives. They're fearful for their culture and their country. If they were living their best lives, too That fear would go away and then they wouldn't feel the need to destroy everything Like that's ultimately what all of us need to do We need to live our best lives so that other people can live their best lives It's like they say when you get on a plane, right? They say, put on your mask before helping others.

You should help others, definitely help others. But you kind of have to tend to yourself first because if you don't, you won't be in a position to help others. So you got to do that, right? We have to be like all of us in this time of strife and difficulty in the world, it's up to us, people who are passionate about free software

to live our best lives so that we can help to heal the world and make it the better place that we want it to be. When you mentioned money not being a motivator earlier, I don't know who originally said the quote, but I think it is a great explanation for money. There will always be people that, it as a great explanation for money. There'll always be people that, you know, they just want to see the number go up. Right. Um, like those, those are always people that these are the people who end up working at like Goldman Sachs, right?

Like these are the bankers. These are people who see number go up and that is, that is their fulfillment in life. But for most normal people, when you can go to a restaurant and not think about the bill, just don't even acknowledge the prices of anything. You want to buy a $80 steak? Who cares? Once you can do that and not even worry what the price is at the end, money doesn't really matter. If you want to buy a $200 bottle of wine and not think about it, like at that point, what is the money doing for you?

Exactly. I feel exactly the same way. There's, there've been all these studies about like the actual amount of money that increases people's happiness. And if I recall, at least in the United States, they found that like people stop becoming happier after they earn about like $75,000 a year or something like that.

They kind of do, but all the biggest gains are between zero and 75. Because your first $1,000 is like, oh, great. I can buy food so that I don't starve to death. And then your next $20,000 is like, oh, I can live somewhere. I have, I can pay the rent, you know? And at a certain point, you've kind of got all the necessities of life that you actually need. And I also believe that people who are doing great work deserve to be rewarded. That's one of the purposes of this

company is to make sure that people doing great work, do very well and make lots of money for it, because like people deserve to be rewarded for it. But ultimately, like the passion has to come first. You can't buy passion with money. You can't really, but you can reward passion with money. I think that's very important. But I agree with you on your

standard of like, how do you know you're rich, basically? Yeah, it's when you can go to a restaurant and not care what it costs. Like a normal, good, decent, nice restaurant, don't care what it costs. That's richness. That's living a rich life, is being able to have like a little bit of luxury and avoid or enjoy like a wonderful experience with somebody you care about and not have to worry about like where the money is gonna come from. That's great.

That's all we really need. We don't need private jets and yachts and 10,000 square meter mansions all over the world. That stuff doesn't actually make anybody happy, I don't think. I think if you're a number go up person and you spend your money on that stuff,

I think at a certain point, it kind of becomes more of a burden because then you have to pay lots of people to take care of those things and ensure them and keep them secure and keep them out of the public eye so people don't think you're some kind of oligarch and like wow that sounds very stressful to me I don't think that's really very fun at all yeah I'll hear these stories about people who are billionaires and like you

know they are actually rich but they hang out with their billionaire friends and they feel poor because they only have a billion dollars where they have ten billion dollars so it's like the scale, like to a normal person, everybody here is insanely wealthy, more money than you could ever spend in your entire life. But when you've focused your entire life on the number, the number does not have a limit. Like if that's your... And it's a trap. The number is a trap because we all live, pretty much everybody here, you know,

everybody in the world almost lives in a capitalistic society. We work to make money, we use money to buy things and our whole lives revolve around money. Money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money. Money for rent, money for food, money for healthcare, health insurance,

if you're not lucky enough to live in a place where it's not like that. You know, money for other insurance, money for clothes, money for everything. And so I think it's really easy for people to get distracted with money and with the number, right? Make your number go up. got the number big enough, I think the next step in human happiness is found in companionship with others. You mentioned Maslow's hierarchy of needs before. Yeah, Maslow's hierarchy, right?

Like at the bottom, you've got survival and then you've got security and then you've got community and then you've got, well, I forget what level four is and then five is self-actualization. Let me see. Physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging, esteem, and then self-actualization. Esteem. Yeah. And, you know, I think I see money as a tool that you can use to allow yourself to get up that that pyramid, right?

But like once you've gotten especially once you've gotten to level five once you're at Self-actualization and you're fortunate enough to do something like work on open source software for a living Which is an incredible blessing like you've won the freaking game. You don't need to care about money anymore Come on, like you can't take it with you. You know, this is, this stuff is a tool. It's a tool that you can use to improve your own position, but it's also a tool you can use to improve other people's positions. I mean, I'm not going to lie. I had to spend a buttload of money to get this company off the ground. Like I put a lot of money into it for the first month. Um, and in that case, money was a tool.

It was a tool. I was fortunate enough to have some from years of saving because I'm not independently wealthy. My parents are not oligarchs or anything. I just worked in the industry and saved money. And I was able to use that tool to create a business that I think can be of value to others and help employ people who are doing incredible work so that they can continue to do incredible work. And like, of what use is just keeping it? Like, money is like energy in a lot of ways. It doesn't like to sit there, you know?

Energy doesn't like to sit in a battery. It wants to be used. Getting back to video games for a second, when I was a kid, one of my favorite games was Alpha Centauri. I don't know if there are any other Alpha Centauri fans out there. But one of the conceits of Alpha Centauri is that people have moved beyond currency, and they use energy as their currency. And so they have literal energy banks,

which are like giant batteries. And all the energy comes from like solar panels. And so people can generate energy themselves with solar panels and they trade it around. Like it's a Forex game. It's very macro. I'm kind of imagining on a zoomed in level what an energy-based economy looks like.

But when I was a kid, this blew my mind. And ever since then, I've always thought the people who created this game had the right idea because money is useless. Money is like an idea we made up. We used to have dumb coins that we mined out of the ground. Now we don't even have that. Money is just electrical impulses. It's numbers on the spreadsheet somewhere. It could be wiped out immediately. It basically doesn't exist. But money functions as energy in the same way that like a motor stops turning if it stops getting energy, a company stops functioning if it stops getting money. Even an individual's life, if that person lives in a capitalist society,

that person's life stops functioning if they stop getting money. So it's the same thing. It's an energy that powers motion. And as long as you need motion, you need energy. Today, that energy comes in the form of a stupid thing we call money, and we've noted down with little impulses, but why couldn't it just be kilowatt hours? Why in the future couldn't we actually generate, store, and have banked amounts of kilowatt hours?

It would actually simplify a whole lot of things. I'm getting way crazily off topic here, but my point is there are parallels between the concept of energy being a thing that that powers motion and doesn't like to be stored and money, which is the same thing. It doesn't like to be stored. It degrades if you store it, right? Unless you put Herculean effort into like preserving the purchasing power of your money. If it just sits there, it loses value and eventually nobody cares about it anymore. So you have to spend it. You have to do something with it. And I kind of think that people who have been blessed with money almost have a duty to spend it on things that are socially useful because

what other value is there for having accumulated that money? Like if it's just gonna sit in your vault or your spreadsheet in somebody's vault and you're gonna say, aha, my number is very high, like screw you. That doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if your number is high, nobody cares. What matters is what you can use that money to do

because it's an energy flow. In the same way that like, if you were a person who was like, oh yeah, I've got like 10 gigawatts of energy. Anybody want my 10 gigawatts of energy? Like people would line up, you know? Steel manufacturers would be like, oh, I would like some of your 10 gigawatts of energy

because then I could melt some of my steel and produce something of value, you know? People would be like, oh, I would like some of my steel and produce something of value, you know? People would be like, oh, I would like some of your 10 gigawatts of energy. You have to freaking do something with it. Otherwise it's useless and money's the same way. Actually, there is a real world example of that that does exist.

In Australia, water is very valuable. In New Mexico too, I'm very familiar with this. So my stepdad, he comes from a farming background. He doesn't do it anymore but his dad, his grandparents did. So he still inherited that farming block. And parts of the block were being sold off but he still retained the water rights. And you can sell off the water rights separate to the land or rent it out to other blocks that may need that additional water. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's, it's like that. We have exactly the same thing here.

I also live in the middle of a barren desert. So, uh, yeah, water's also very valuable here. I wish it would rain. It hasn't rained in like three months. Not great. It would rain a couple of days ago, but you know, it you know it's good. Could you send some here? We could use it. We don't have much to send there. I know you've got you need to keep it for yourself yeah we should pipe it in from Seattle or something. But yeah you know it's it and water is the same

way right like water just if it's it's there stagnant it gets brackish mosquitoes lay eggs in it like you have to do something with water. Is the same way. And I think all these resources, like I think of money is just a resource in that way. You have to do something with it or else it's just like completely pointless to have accumulated it in the first place. Basically, one less thing I want to touch on is. Because you do this

this consultancy, Katie work, but you also do your own, you know, just being involved in KDE, having fun with it. How do you find yourself managing the time between those two different tasks? It's a good question. I have a fairly regimented day, so I wake up and I immediately look at company stuff. I open like company chat, and then I open KDE chat, I look through all of those things. There's of course, a lot of overlap here, because all the company stuff is KDE stuff. Throughout the day, I'll be having like company chats, and

then also doing KDE chats. And I look at company email, and I look at KDE email, and I do all of those in sort of a block and After all the company and KDE stuff is done Then I'll look through my to-do list of KDE EV stuff and see if I have the energy to do any of that I'll be honest some days I don't some days I definitely don't do that and I go and I play endless space to Or something else But you know then I'll do KDE EV stuff

and then I just kind of do it, I'll do it again. Do it again the next day. I have to do things in like an order in a schedule. And I find that I get kind of kerfuffles if I am not able to do things in the order that I want to do them in, because I have a very specific workflow that I can be efficient with.

A big part of my workflow involves my email being automatically tagged and categorized. I wrote a blog post about this. That's like super important. I would probably waste like an hour a day without that. But yeah, I don't know if there's like a magic bullet or the secret technique there. I just kinda, I refined my approach over time and focused on efficiency. I mean, I'm kind of an efficiency nerd. So almost everything I do, I'm always thinking like, how can I do the same thing faster?

How can I achieve more with the same amount? So that efficiency mindset has helped me to be very productive in whatever endeavor I sit down to do because it means that I can then get done with it quickly and move on to the next thing. But yeah, it's just kind of that basically. Well, you know, I think we've pretty much covered everything I want to talk about. Yeah. This is a good episode. I enjoyed this. Oh, right. Well, I did too. Thanks a lot for having me. I mean, the time has just flown

by. I can't believe it's been almost two hours. Yeah. Yeah. It's just going on 9.24 AM here. So. Nice. Got a stream not long after this. It's almost 5 PM here. So I guess if there's anybody that happens to maybe want to get some KD work done through Tech Paladin or anything else you want to direct people to, yeah, give them things they can go look at. Yeah, I would probably be remiss as a CEO if I didn't plug my own company

at this point. So I'm gonna have to start with that. I'm going to say if you want expert work done on KDE software that is done by the experts who develop it themselves, you can go to techpaladin software.com and get in contact with us and we'll figure out something that works out really well for everybody. Outside of company matters, if you like reading my random silly musings, you can go to pointieststick.com, which is where my personal blog is now, and I write random stuff there. You can also go to blogs.kde.org, and you can read This Week in Plasma, which I publish over there. It's now in KDE infrastructure.

Yeah, that is really cool that it is actually like, it's now like the official KDE thing. Yeah, I'm really happy. Like in principle, people can help me out with it. I'm kind of still like the person doing it, but I don't have to be. Like I can hand it off to anybody else because it's on KDE infrastructure.

So yeah, blogs.kde.org is a place where you can find some of the stuff that I write. Yeah, and those are basically the places where you can consume information written by me. If you just wanna get in touch, I'm nathat.kde.org, that's all public. I'm on KDE's Matrix channel and all of those places. Sometimes I stop by on discuss.kd.org,

the forum as well when I have time. I wish I had more time for that, but I don't have hardly enough time for it. But occasionally I stop by there. So yeah, you know, say hi and be super duper awesome. Go out there and live your best life, be your best self so that we can heal the sad, sick world that we live in.

And if we want to support the KDE project directly, there's also donation buttons on the KDE site for that as well. That's right. That will be at kde.org slash donate. You can go there. You can support KDE EV, which is a German nonprofit. We run on an incredibly tiny shoestring budget. You can see that we have like 10 staff and contractors now and all of this stuff runs yearly on vastly less than a million euros or less budget with something like 600,000 euros, like a very, very, very tiny amount of money.

So every donation makes a huge difference. We do a lot with a little. So everything that you can donate there helps too. And most importantly, I mean mean forgetting about the silly money thing Donating your time and your your energy and your skills makes the biggest difference So if you use plasma or KDE software and you like it and you think it's awesome and you think there's some way that it Can be made better? Help out submit merge requests triage do stuff, engage with the community.

There are such an astonishingly small number of people doing so much in KDE that I think most people wouldn't even believe it. So I write in every blog post that you're not a number, that if you participate, you'll be making a difference. That's not just blowing smoke up people's butt, it's true. If you help out donating your time, you make a giant difference. That's not just blowing smoke up people's butt. It's true. You know, if you help out donating your time, you make a giant difference. So that's probably the most impactful thing that anybody can do if they want to get involved. And I would encourage

anybody to do it. It's something that has changed my life for the better. And I think it can change other people's lives too. The GitLab is invent.kd.org. And you can have a matrix if people want to get involved in talking about things that maybe they want to, you know, find out how to do something. Exactly, exactly. It's good stuff.

So yeah, keep on being awesome everybody. And thank you so much for two hours of your time or however many hours this ends up being cut to, cutting out all the super boring stuff I'm sure I said. Thank you so much for your time and go on and be excellent. As for my outro, I am already upset to do this video. You think after 250 episodes I could speak. I do Linux videos six-ish days a week. Check that out. We just passed 100k the other day, which is really cool. I don't know how I get my plaque, so I'm going to work that out.

But I will get my plaque, which I think is now just made of plywood. They just put silver paint on. So, you know, they're not as nice as they used to be. Yeah, I know the gold ones literally are just plywood they've just painted gold yeah anyway it certainly looks nice it'll look great in the background yeah my gaming channel is a bro you on games right now I've probably by the time this goes out no I'll still be playing Strange in the Paradise, but I'll also be playing Portal in the other slot. I've never played Portal, so that'll be fun. I'm just gonna go... Yeah, I'm gonna start playing that just after we finish the recording here after I got some food.

The... I've got a react channel as well, upload clips there from the stream, so go check that out if you just want to see random rambling that's less planned out than my main channel rambling and if you're watching the video version this you can find the audio version on basically every podcast platform search tech over t on Spotify we have video as well which is neat I don't know why anyone watches video on Spotify but it's a thing you can do apparently and if you want to see the video version this it is on YouTube at tech over T. As always, I'll give you the final word. What would you like to say?

Thank you for your time, everybody. And like I said, go live your best self, be awesome, heal the world, make everything better. That's what we all need. Completely agree. Yeah.