Hi all,
It's been a while since I posted a blog in the 'who is KDE' series (part 1, part 2). Meanwhile, there are of course still plenty of great blogs out there, and the ones I described last time might be worth revisiting.
This blog was prompted by me bumping into our cool buzz.kde.org site (which, btw, doesn't work properly in Chromium? Back to Konqi then..). A tweet in there pointed to this blog, in Polish (google translate here). It reviews a SVN version of the 4.4 release, mostly focusing on plasma stuff. But there is also news on KWin, Marble and Dolphin. My only gripe is that the author calls it Desktop Envirionment still - maybe I should comment on that ;-)
Now that the GSoC students have been chosen (see Lydia's blog, a dot story is in the making) Planet KDE is flooded with blogs from excited new developers who've been selected. I think it is incredibly cool to see there are quite a few from outside the traditional EU/US area - we've got two GSoC'ers from Peru, 11 (!) from India and of course a few Brazilians.
Planet India currently only has a blog from Akarsh Simha announcing two students for KStars but I also see two Pardus projects there, which most likely build on Qt/KDE (and Python) as well.
Planet Peru meanwhile shows our student Ronny has been active with more than his GSoC proposal (read how his KDE life started) and it seems the Peru FOSS community is pretty active. I found this page about a government bill about FOSS from 2002 when googling - it seems the government supports FOSS as well. I'd love to hear more about how that turned out so I'm glad Ronny is now on planet KDE ;-)
The growing diversity in our community brings more fun and more creativity, so I welcome it. I'm awaiting a few GSoC students from Nigeria - after reading the final report from Ade about the conference there I have high hopes... But for now, I think we're looking at a very successful Summer of Code, and those who aren't in yet: you can join the Season of KDE project, where despite the lack of financial compensation you will get the same guidance and some cool (Kool?) gear! Lydia is also still looking for mentors, btw. If you would love to do KDE Promo things, I hereby offer my services as mentor!
Oh and talking about promo I have some good news since my previous blog about some tasks for KDE promo: our new KDE e.V. intern, Torsten Thelke, is working on the boothbox! Points for Torsten ;-)
But there is still much more to do, including some layout work on a booklet for which we have text but still needs printing... Contact me if you would be able to do that. And the 'would be able' is more about time and effort than about skills, as usual!
Let me finish by giving a big thank you to the people active in the Indian community and in South America for bringing us some great new GSoC developers and for Being KDE! And good luck to all the new developers - kick ass!
Love,
Jos
Keep us abreast of these news: I reread it twice and am very interested.
ReplyDeleteThe most fascinating thing with Free Software projects are the fact taht the people come from so many countries and this is as fascinating on a sociological level as a technical one.
My friends uncle teaches in a brazilian university and he said in 2009-2010 he had more than 60% who used Gnu-Linux on a semi regular or regular basis and about 10-15% who had already contributed to a free software project. 10 years ago he could count on one hand the first year students who had any experience using Gnu-Linux.
He is very passionate and enthusiastic about the future in his country and south america in the OS fields because students can make an impact at a young age in FLOSS.
Sure, first year students arent going to be working on the kernel most usually but every project has grunt work to do and someone who does well at those long and boring tasks will welcomed when they are ready for more challenging tasks.
While his brother works in a major canadian university and you cant use the schools network if you are running a Linux OS on your laptop..
Needless to say both brothers have a totally different outlook of where we are headed.