On Nov 17, 2005, at 12:00 PM, Bill Jonas wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 17, 2005 at 09:25:33AM -0700, Ben Browning wrote:
>> The K in KDE may well stand for "kludged" though ;)
>
> I know you're joking around, but it originally stood for "kool".  (I
> believe that today it is officially just "K", but I could be wrong.)
>
> Here's an HTML-ized version of the original Usenet post:
> http://www.kde.org/announcements/announcement.php
>
Yeah, you are right that the K doesn't stand for anything.   
Officially, it never did.  Now I say that even with the link to the  
original USENET post listed above :-)

Basically, Matthias wanted it to be called KDE in an obvious play on  
CDE.  This is even more understandable when you realize that many  
words that are spelled with a 'C' in English are spelled with a 'K'  
in German.  So he randomly picked 'Kool' for the announcement.  A few  
days after that announcement, Matthias met with Martin and Kalle and  
a few others at the university and one of the first things they  
decided on was to drop the 'Kool' part of the name and just keep it a K.

So while the original announcement did have 'Kool', there has never  
been one single line of code written for KDE under that name.  For  
all extents and purposes, any part of KDE that was released as KDE  
did so with a meaningless K.

As a slight digression, there is a tip in the KDE Tip of the Day that  
says something about it being after L or meaning something in Czech  
or whatever.  I don't remember.  In any event, I think Kalle entered  
that tip as a joke and it stuck for some reason.  It's not even  
remotely true, though.

Just a little random equally meaningless history :-)

Former KDE Evangelist,
Kurt
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