Amarok Blog

Many KDE developers are on Facebook. A while back I wondered if it would be possible to have an official KDE developers' network on Facebook -- after all, there are networks for schools, jobs, cities, and more (and for many developers, KDE is literally or figuratively a job...)

As it turned out, there was a "Kde" network -- but something was odd. To join a work network you have to have an email address affiliated with the network. KDE owns kde.com and kde.org -- so who was this? The only other "KDE" I could find that seemed like it would be legit was the Kentucky Department of Education, and I rather doubted it was them, because they would likely have used all-uppercase KDE as well. So I started an inquiry with Facebook, trying to figure out if either it was someone squatting on our name (and trademark) or whether it was some legit organization -- in which case, would they mind donating the network to us?

After several months of back-and-forth with the people at Facebook, who were very nice (if a bit slow ), I'm happy to say that we've regained the KDE network (properly capitalized) as our own. I still don't know the whole story as to who was there before, and never will due to their privacy policies, but I'll say this:

• If you were in the "Kde" network before and Facebook asked if you would mind donating it to us, and you did, thanks so much!


• If someone was simply squatting in the "Kde" network before, then thanks, Facebook, for kicking them out!