German Federal Cross of Merit for KDE Founder

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Article Source The H
November 9, 2009, 2:05 am

The initiator of the free K Desktop Environment (KDE), Matthias Ettrich, was decorated with the German Federal Cross of Merit in Berlin on Friday. The highest German state decoration for the common good was awarded to him for his contributions in the field of open source software.

In 1996, Ettrich initiated the “Kool Desktop Environment” to establish a more user-friendly interface for Linux, which at that point still relied heavily on the command line. When later on the project became established on a more professional basis, its developers decided to drop the ‘Kool’ and simply use K…

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