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Nate Graham is widely known in the KDE world; he is a board member of the KDE e.V., the non-profit company that supports KDE development. He also writes the "This Week in KDE" blogposts, has done various interviews talking about KDE software, and so on.
Yesterday he has announced that he created a for-profit company that hire various KDE developers, and that will become a KDE e.V. Patron as well. The company is called Techpaladin, and it's co-owned by David Edmundson, another very public developer (who's also given interviews on KDE!).
On top of that, I'm happy to announce that I am one of the contractors of Techpaladin, and I'll be continuing my KDE Plasma development work with them. This might sound exciting, but - as usual - to understand the full scope of this news we need a few additional bits of context.
Firstly, both mine, Nate's, and David's previous employer was Blue Systems. BS is a German company that actively works (or, worked) on projects such as KDE Plasma, Netrunner OS, Plasma Mobile, Manjaro, KDE Neon, MAUI, the Calamares installer, and more.
Blue Systems was founded by the German businessman Clemens Tönnies Jr. If you just search that name this guy will pop up, and you'll discover that he own 46% of a meat processing industry, and has an estimated wealth of around 1.6B dollars. This is the senior Clemens, not the junior, who is his nephew.
Clemens Tönnies Jr. left the meat processing company by transferring his shares to the brother, and there's very few public information about him. He has given an interview back in 2012 to "golem [dot] de", and back then he was a 36 years old computer scientist and self-described philanthropist.
Clemens started sponsoring the KDE e.V. and, back then, even hired Johnathan Riddel, who packaged releases of Kubuntu, after Canonical discontinued support for that distribution.
In 2012, Blue Systems "had no business model, at least not yet". However, more recently, they had added Valve's SteamOS to the list of official collaborations; as I have previously covered on this channel, Valve had decided to sponsor KDE development work through Blue Systems, which led to many KDE developers becoming contractors for Blue Systems whilst sponsored by Valve.
As I - somewhat privately - announced a bit less than two years ago, this also included myself; I've been a contractor for Blue Systems, sponsored by Valve, for quite some time now.
To be clear, Blue System was not the only Valve-sponsored company. As another example, Igalia also had (and, I think, still has?) a contract to work on the graphic stack of the SteamDeck.
Yet another example is Collabora, who also briefly talked about their work with Valve regarding SteamOS:
But then, what happened to Blue Systems? According to Nate, about a dozen of Blue Systems' current people moved to the new Techpaladin company; this comes after six years of BS employing Nate.
The reason for the change is not stated, but according to Nate it has not been any kind of "hostile takeover", but rather a "mutual decision made between the owner of Blue Systems, myself and David Edmundson, and Blue Systems' other personell who are moving over".
We currently know that the company has more than a dozen contractors and employees "sread across 7 countries and 2 continents", plus a co-owner.
This is not the first time that Nate runs a company; he also talks about the fact that from 2011 through 2014 he had a two-person 3D printer company, named - hold for it - Techpaladin Printing. They sold parts and kits, and according to Nate, it was his first exposure to the Free and Open Source Software movement.
According to the Nate, TechPaladin also inherited the Valve contract that Blue Systems had, as their first (and currently, only) client. As they say on their webpage (or should I say, our webpage) "we're responsible for the user experience of the Steam Deck in desktop made".
Techpaladin seems to also be currently looking for other clients. As Nate says, if you see an awful bug that you're experiencing, you can get in touch and the company will help you sponsor that bug fix, or maybe a new feature, or any kind of custom development.
Most likely, Techpaladin is also looking for other corporate clients; following Valve example, other companies that use KDE Plasma on their hardware might benefit from paying Techpaladin to improve the desktop specifically for their devices.
Nate will be running the business, and he's also currently a KDE e.V. board member, but he plans to still publish This Week in Plasma, still do technical work, review other people's merge request, triage bug reports, and so on. So, the work is not stopping.
Really, what this means is that, from now on, the contract that Valve has to improve KDE Plasma is now in the hands of, well, KDE developers (Nate and David). It will be interesting to see how this company grows, and how it will maintain its relationship with the KDE e.V. non-profit.
And, if you know anyone who wants to sponsor some feature, or any company that needs KDE development of any kind, feel free to reach out to Techpaladin to get those things done!
