Why would Canonical pay to have Dell preinstall Ubuntu? That doesn't make any sense. If anything, Dell might pay Canonical to help them to properly set up Ubuntu on the Dell machines.

How does an anonymous counting of active installs violate privacy? All this does is say to the server "I exist" without specifying who you are. The worst case scenario is that the server records the IP address the info comes from, and therefor knows that at date such and such IP this and that was used by an Ubuntu machine of a certain HW model. Where is the violation of privacy? There is no *private* information here.

I think you are talking about the package popularity contest. This is a different piece of software.

"I'm aware of techbase. It's not really helpful. Let me give an example. Suppose I want to write a Plasmoid. Okay, let's start at techbase.kde.org. Under "Discover" I click on "Developing with KDE." Fine so far. Now what do I click? It's hard to say -- I want an API reference. Nevertheless, I figure out that I need to click on "KDE Architecture." Okay, now I click on "KDE 4 Architecture Overview." Ooh, I finally see a link to "Plasma - the Desktop." I click it."

At techbase.kde.org under Developing with KDE have a link to API Documentation. At http://techbase.kde.org/Development under KDE Architecture there's another link to API Documentation.

Still, what is there is quite useless.

KOffice has only one codebase, so you would use the exact same version regardless of OS. Therefor it must mean that the bulk of the work is on porting the KDE4 platform.

I fail to see why the licensing of Qt3 has any bearing on KOffice2, since KOffice2 uses Qt4.