Frameworks 5.0 is out!

It took us a while but here it is. And I think we did quite a decent job communicating this to the outside world with articles like

• An extensive overview of and background on Frameworks 5
• Tech Preview release article with lots of info
• How KDE contributed to Qt 5.2 to ready it as base for Frameworks 5
• The mini series of 'where KDE is going' discussed Frameworks and its importance pt 1, pt 2
• Article for Linux.com about why Frameworks is a big deal for Free Software

For the final release (this one, I mean) we had far less time than I had hoped - I wrote most of the announcement last Saturday (though we started a few days earlier and had our already-prepared communication plan) and we didn't really rally as much of our 'friends' to help promote the release as I had planned initially. And yesterday my internet broke down so in the end, Mario and Jonathan R had to put most of it live, half a day behind plan. But despite these issues, it did turn out quite well I think.

Now the communication is done and it is up to the code to prove itself in real life!

As I blogged before, I think this is a huge deal for Free Software on desktops AND mobile devices - it goes far beyond the KDE community. Qt is by far the largest Free Software ecosystem doing native (non-web, I mean) end-user software, but much of that is proprietary. Which makes sense - Digia and the other companies in and around Qt have to make money and don't have 'spreading Free Software' as their prime goal. Frameworks introduces a genuine FOSS touch to that, hopefully bringing many of these developers in touch with the KDE community and the Open Source development processes.

Oh, and just a few more days to go to support Randa 2014, and support it really needs. Remember, this is where Frameworks started! Let's see what KDE comes up with this year at Randa ;-)

Where KDE is going...

In my blog about conf.kde.in, I promised I would blogify my talk about KDE's future but failed to publish it until now. I thought the content might be a good fit for on paper. It took a while, but the upcoming Linux Voice should feature an extended version of these blog posts about where KDE is going, with quotes from a variety of KDE folk providing some background.

Meanwhile, on the dot I have published an updated version of the first blog post about the technical side of things: KDE software. It is mostly aimed at people not intimately familiar with KDE but curious about what is coming. Users, for example...

If you find a bug, report it to me or the dot editors! And: spread the article around for users and interested people to read...

Building Converging UIs

I just blogged about my article on linux.com about the just-released KDE Frameworks 5 sneak preview.

Convergence in 2010: Plasma Netbook

Converging Form Factors

On the Frameworks, one can soon expect to see releases of KDE's Plasma Workspaces. A Technology Preview of Plasma 2 has already been released and this ambitious project has not lost any of its goals. Today, I noted that ZDNet's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote about what he expects from Ubuntu in 2014. There, he quotes Jono Bacon talking about formfactor convergence. And the intarwebs are full of people making jokes that Microsoft is copying Ubuntu with their single UI for multiple devices. But let's not forget where they got their ideas...

What is real ambition?

I would argue that neither Apple, Microsoft, GNOME, nor Ubuntu/Canonical are even half as ambitious as the KDE Community in the area of convergence. They are all merely catching up to the state of KDE technology in 2010. In that year, the KDE community released Plasma Netbook, a plasma-based shell optimized for another form factor: the netbook. With far more advanced convergence than anybody today has yet shown: Plasma Netbook and Plasma Desktop share well over 90% of their code, as opposed to not even sharing toolkit or display shell (Ubuntu) and having a completely separate desktop (Apple). On Plasma, widgets can dynamically adjust to the constraints of their environment, be it on a panel, free-form on the desktop, full-screen, in a window or in a tiled environment. And yes, the different form-factor optimized shells be switched on-the-fly. No separate login or account, no loss of functionality, no separate applications for each shell, nothing like that. It just works. See this blog from 2011 to get an idea how the tablet plans were doing.

Plasma on desktop/netbook/phone in 2011.

I understand what Microsoft is doing - trying to build a single user interface for vastly different devices. And I guess we've all seen how it does not work - Apple is smarter, in that regard. Underlying technology can of course be re-used but you simply can not make a UI which works equally well on a 75 DPI 24" screen with mouse & keyboard, on a 455 dpi touch phone, on a 300 DPI touch tablet and a 64" television with Kinect or something like that...

Instead, the Plasma team has build a technology which separates presentation from logic, allowing you to build UI's which adapt dynamically to the needs of the form factor.

Below is a video of Plasma's awareness of the container size in action, like it has functioned since it was released in 2008.


Now I don't deny that in terms of resources, MS and Apple are so far ahead they can make pigs fly. Our more advanced architecture and ideas can't really compete with what they do and as long as we have 0.5% market share on the desktop, Free Software will probably not get the resources it needs to polish things to the same degree. That's a bit frustrating but it doesn't mean we frequently do things far beyond what the big boys do: anybody who has seen the introduction of the upcoming release of Mac OS X and knew about KDE Connect knows we're way ahead of them when it comes to phone-desktop integration ;-)

Moving Forward

All this technology will be brought to a new level with the release of Plasma 5, where your workspace will be able to smoothly morph into a different form factor without even a hickup. So, when it comes to the convergence of formfactors, KDE is lightyears ahead of what the competition is even aiming for. And outside of that, we're doing awesome stuff, for sure.

Did I say something about the power of innovating in the open? That's what I'm talking about.

KDE Frameworks 5 A Big Deal

Today, the KDE Community has released KDE Frameworks 5. I've written a guest blog on linux.com about why I think that that matters for Free Software.

Why it matters

In short, I argue that the most used Free Software toolkit stands to benefit tremendously from the knowledge, experience and code of the dominant Free Software desktop project.

The value of a community like KDE can hardly be overstated. The open and inspiring place it provides naturally is something companies spend billions to build (and usually fail). The KDE community has already contributed a lot to Qt and with Frameworks 5 this stands to continue at a fast pace.

So, as I conclude in the article:

A complete, mature and openly developed toolkit on and for open source platforms is important for Free and Open Source, for current hardware configurations, the new generation of mobile devices and other consumer electronics. KDE Frameworks is an important contribution to innovative and compelling open platforms.

And it is coming soon

And Free Software won't have to wait long. As Sebastian Kügler noted, most of the work is done. Two modules, KArchive and Threadweaver are already good to go and as Mirko Boehm blogged, these are very mature and usable already. He noted that no API breaks are coming for Threadweaver and as far as I know the same is true for KArchive, making these two ready for use right now.

This allows developers to save development and maintenance work. You can be assured that this code is mature, tested and build based on real-world needs, developed in an open governance process and following clear code- and API style guidelines.

And that is a big deal ;-)



Of course, openSUSE offers binaries for openSUSE 12.3, 13.1 and Factory.

Help KDE Communicate Frameworks 5 and the Future of KDE!

With the 4.11 release out of the door (yay!) there is more and more focus on what is coming from KDE in the future. The Workspaces (and only the workspaces) are out with a long term support release: for the next two years, the Plasma team will keep churning out bugfix and tiny-feature releases for the Workspaces 4.11 release.

Meanwhile, the libraries essentially have already been in long term support since their 4.9 version, with only minor changes coming in (with a few exceptions like Nepomuk). Most Platform developers are focusing on Frameworks 5, which will bring some exciting changes to our libraries and the way they are laid out. This will open up our libraries to users outside of the KDE world, potentially widening the 'KDE ecosystem' significantly. And we need to communicate this!

The applications on the other hand are expected to do couple of more releases before a (probably gradual?) transition to Frameworks 5. And who knows what will happen then?

How confusing!

All this means some confusion. We've already seen the first articles where elements of the above are mis-understood. It is time we do some work on clarification and get a dot article out on where we are going. I have made a 'skeleton' article, with the most important facts (like the above!) and links and hints to where to learn more.

It might sound like a terribly complicated thing, and to some extend - it is. But at the same time, it has all been explained in various places already, most of the writing is just bringing things together. So you don't need to know that much about the whole thing to do a good job! Who feels like doing this? You can contact me (I can't believe my mail address is hard to find on the web, considering how much spam I get :D) or ask on kde-promo@kde.org, our mailing list.

Who's up for it?

On Innovation, Free Software, NIH, Geary, Trojita and KDE PIM

I argue that if Free Software wants to get anywhere, it needs a culture of 'collaboration first'. In most areas, we have that. In some, we don't - and that is hurting. The desktop is probably a prime example of that.

Rob Boudreau wrote an opinion piece about Personal Information Management (PIM) and the future. He concludes that 2013 has different requirements from PIM than 1995, and:

"KDE PIM seems to be the only FOSS project working on technology that will eventually go beyond just the PIM itself"

I think reality agrees with him. Mobile devices are cleverly integrating chat, email, social media and phone in one. Contacts have details on all of these and show the latest tweet or Facebook message of that person as status. Why doesn't the desktop do this? Well, it does, but only by putting your data on corporate servers, accessible though web browsers: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, ...

The Linux Desktop has a mission here: help keep user data out of the greedy hands of Google, Facebook and Microsofts! That can only be done by building on the shoulders of giants, not by re-inventing the wheel out of sheer arrogance. Let me explain what I mean.

Collaboration

10 years ago I often presented to people new to Free Software and how we work. I would explain the benefits of Open Source so:

"Imagine you thought of the best New Idea for word processing. From now on, documents will almost write themselves. But you first have to embark on the huge journey to write a full word processor. Three years later, your amazing application does not get anywhere as it can't open MS Word files."

"Imagine instead you added your amazing feature to an existing word processor. The discussion with the experienced word processor developers even resulted in a better result!"

Being able to stand on the shoulders of giants is an important benefit from collaboration in Free Software. We do have competing projects but note that most successful forks and rewrites were started due to a lack of collaboration! A recent example is LibreOffice. Often people from the 'original' project join or even start the fork or rewrite. Wayland is build by the Xorg team and the MySQL fork MariaDB is led by the founder of MySQL!

The Linux kernel is another great example. Google, for example, is putting in enormous resources in getting their technologies back into the kernel. After a period of forking for the benefit of speed and efficiency, they figured out that in the long run, it actually is more efficient to not fork and put in the extra effort in collaboration.

Collaboration-by-default is not a given. Aaron Seigo said about KDE:

"The open nature of the community has purged the “not invented here” syndrome from our ranks"

Yes, the KDE community has a strong tradition of re-using efforts and building on the shoulders of giants. And questioning those who don't! But such a culture took years to build as there is plenty reason to NOT collaborate.

Reasons for not collaborating

Failing forks or duplicating projects are often based on personal conflicts or a dislike for certain toolkits, languages or technical choices. And there is much starting from scratch because developers just focus on their own problem or want to learn something new.. While I would argue that you probably learn more working with experienced, competent people, and you might get more done, too, it is not hard to understand these reasons.

Then, there is psychology. Most people think they are smarter than average and programmers are no different (sometimes expressed as "what others do is easy")... Given the bell-curve followed by the distribution of intelligence, this clearly is one of the many fallacies our brain saddles us with. Even companies are affected. Google, working to get their features into the upstream kernel, discovered that not all the intelligent people in the world work for them and there is lots of room for improvements in what their team came up with.

More than one mail client

I argue that this last reason leads to more duplication of effort than healthy in the area of mail clients. Recently, Yorba pushed to get funding for Geary, another 'new approach to mail'. And there is Trojita, also providing a great IMAP client. Both projects were started in the last couple of years and seem to be re-inventing the wheel -- twice. As you probably saw many prominent developers giving a hard time to a company insisting upon writing another display server, I hope you understand how misguided I think this is. Yorba said they decided to write a new email client to keep things simple and fast and due to the complexity of other mail clients... I described the rationale and wrongness of this "let's write a new mail client" approach in a comment on LWN a while ago. In short, I'm betting that the reasons behind it boil down to the previously mentioned combination of over-estimating oneself and underestimating the problem. In the case of email probably a lack of ambition and forward-thinking as well. Just email doesn't cut it in 2013, certainly not 5 years from now.

Bringing conversation-view to email is an awesome idea - and can probably be done through a Google Summer of Code project within an existing client. Writing an entirely new email experience needs a bit more effort of course, but writing the entire underlying infrastructure too - that is just a sodding waste of time, pardon my French. Good to see Trojita at least has joined the KDE community and is working with KDE PIM! How about you, Geary?

More than one conference

I've always been a big proponent of the Desktop Summits and I do indeed think that it shows both arrogance and a lack of big-picture thinking that these don't happen anymore. I'm glad that the KDE board, including Agustin (who organized the first Desktop Summit) managed to kick off a "freedesktop summit" at the SUSE offices. I'm also glad that some people who DO see the benefit of collaboration participated there - even if their communities don't (yet) understand that it is worth the investment.

What we need

We need a culture where we are critical of people who don't try to work together or are unwilling to put in effort to collaborate. Free Software depends on collaboration and not working together is just counterproductive. So I'd like to ask all readers to support collaboration: talk about collaboration, share the tales of success. And if somebody decides to write an app from scratch, or is writing an application doing the same thing another does - question them, ask why they go it alone, why not collaborate. It is totally OK to be critical of forks and anti-collaborative behavior. You don't have to beat anyone up, but at least making them think about it is a good thing. And if you're a developer: integrate technologies, build re-usable libraries. And remember that the shoulders YOU are standing on can be made stronger for future generations of Libre developers! Just dumping disconnected code is NOT a contribution to Free Software, contrary to what some folks seem to think.

I'd also like to ask people to support KDE PIM: if we want to have a shot at keeping our data out of greedy corporate hands and if we want to ever get onto the corporate desktop, Akonadi is the only architecture that really has a shot. Instead of writing new wheels, let's improve this one together! Yes, KDE PIM needs UI work. Then why not do that? Writing a new mail client makes total sense - if you build it on a proper infrastructure. The KDE PIM team is greatly looking forward to help people who want to write new mail, RSS, Facebook or contact management applications. Skills required are mostly related to motivation and the willingness to ask questions and get help - otherwise, javascript coding skills will probably get you pretty far as it makes all the sense in the world to write these new UI's in QML.

Concluding

I'm happy to concede that things are not black and white. I'm sure nobody can fully judge neither Geary nor Trojita or all aspects of the Desktop Summit. Mea culpa for any wrongness. But please take the lesson to heart: there is great value in collaboration. And getting these benefits means putting in 'extra' efforts, yes, it can cost you something in the short run - that is the whole point of long-term vs short-term thinking. So, next time somebody argues that 'we can go faster if we do it alone', tell them that most smart people do NOT work for you and problems are always simple when they're not (yet) yours. Or just remind them that once upon a time, people thought volunteers could never write a encyclopedia. It is the 21st century and collaboration is what sets apart winners from losers.

Take care!

Pre and post conference blues...

Heya all,

Since the Akademy conference in Estonia beginning of August I've been rather quiet as I have been struggling with health issues. After loosing some blood and undergoing a few *scopy's the people with stethoscopes don't seem too worried so neither am I but it has been unpleasant at times. Not too many tests left - an MRI and another 'scopy' in December, I hope they can give me a diagnosis by then.

It has been frustrating to have had to cancel trips to the openSUSE Summit, COSCUP, Brazil and more. And at the openSUSE Conference (my first trip in 3 months) I had to skip the evening fun - instead opting for quiet food-in-the-hotel and early bed. Believe me: not nice.

new team: 'the openSUSE team'

Luckily, I'm getting back on my feet and at a recent visit to Nürnberg I even went out a night with my new team mates. Yup, a new team - if you're following the openSUSE mailing lists, you probably have heard that already. In my two years of 'community manager' of openSUSE, I've worked with people around the company and community - but I was not really part of a formal team. Independence is nice but it also can make you take on a few things too many - I know I did. So, when it was decided to try and re-arrange things with regards to the openSUSE Boosters team, I decided it was a good idea to join the team and help it find directions. Together we can do more, and all that.

It means the scope of the former boosters team (now just 'openSUSE team') has widened: I will of course continue to care about the things I used to care about. Things like the atmosphere in the community, governance, strategy - and of course marketing, the ambassador program and presenting a friendly face to the wider Free Software world. But I'll be doing that together with the rest of the team now, not alone!

Things are quite different now, so let's see how it'll go.

Conference last month

So, the openSUSE conference was my first event since a while. It was quite awesome, with a lot of faces I hadn't seen in a while and a lot of excitement. We organized a bunch of interviews with people, which will be released over the coming months. On the openSUSE days, a few important things were discussed, results of which have been posted to mailing lists. I'm working on a summary of that but it'll take a bit longer. One thing I already managed to change: Richard gave some feedback on the 'we believe' poster and we decided it needed a fourth item. Which I added, see the image on the right.

You can get the source for the poster in our github repo.

Conferences coming

There'll be more events, of course. On short notice, I'll be at the QtDevDays in Berlin - it's practically next door and a great way to meet people. I've heard we can expect 500+ people there from all over the (huge) Qt ecosystem. It'll be interesting to talk to people outside of the usual Linux crowd: Qt has managed to grow well beyond the Linux Desktop into an industry standard for a wide variety of use cases.

Open Innovation and Open Governance

On Thursday the 15th I'll be leading a discussion session about open governance in the Open Innovation track at the 'Summit of new thinking', also in Berlin.

I'll write a tad more about that in a blog tomorrow.

For now, I have a conference to dress up for, so see you later, alligator ;-)

Help out KDE marketing!

Hi Folks!

The KDE marketeers are gearing up for a new challenge: engage the wider Qt developer community about KDE.

"Now why would they care about KDE?" You might be asking yourself...

Well, our biggest asset is KDELibs! Lots of interesting classes up to full frameworks like Phonon and such ready for the taking and using. Much of these will become far easier to use when we transform KDELibs into Frameworks 5. More rapid application development and less maintenance work are the result.

The question we marketing people have is:

what classes and components in KDELibs/Frameworks 5 do you think are most interesting for external Qt developers and why?

Out of your answers we hope to create a presentation with an overview of the most useful parts of Frameworks 5 for Qt developers. This presentation can be given at events like the Qt Developers Day. and should get people excited about what's coming from the KDE side to Qt.

You can add suggestions and if possible please (links to) explanations, tutorials/documentation and why's in the comments below or on mail to myself or kde promo.

Thanks in advance!

Fork me on GitHub

Christopher Wickert pointed me to web browser Qupzilla. Qupzilla mimics the Mozilla Firefox UI closely but is build on WebKit and Qt.

This project was started about a year ago by a Czech student named David Rosca. So you expect an incomplete browser. And you're wrong. Qupzilla has all the features you'd expect from a modern browser while being fast and stable.

Cool

What is cool about Qupzilla is that David does a lot of things right:

• It has a pretty website. That's advertisement!
• The site makes it easy to find the important stuff.
• It is easy to contribute and that fact is advertised with the awesome "Fork me on GitHub" ribbon and the prominent 'contribute' button. GitHub is awesome but people have to find the repo!
• Has good documentation. Both on how to contribute and how to use.
• Communicates what is going on! It gets people engaged, makes them care. And thus more likely to contribute. One blog a month sounds like little but it's enough to keep some live in there.
• Has an easy and pretty download page, using the Open Build Service for multi-distro support and since today using the OBS download integration.

Result: the GitHub repo mentions 14 contributors, showing a nice graph of the growth.

Razor-Qt in openSUSE?

On a different note, the package of Qupzilla has become part of the X11:QtDesktop project, where Petr Vanek and Eugene Pivnev are building Razor-Qt, the Qt based Desktop Environment. As devel project they're open to merge requests (github style, as OBS works that way too) or of course new team members. And they are aiming to Factory and thus openSUSE 12.2 inclusion soon!

Go to conferences!

As Petr, Eugene and David are all Czech FOSS developers I'd like to remind them that there are two conferences taking place within a reasonable distance of their beloved country: openSUSE Conference will take place in October in Prague this year and KDE's Akademy conference will happen from 30th June to the 6th of July 2012 in Tallinn, Estonia. KDE, as biggest community of Qt users, and openSUSE, as most important KDE distribution, would both welcome you very much! I can guarantee that as I'm involved with both conferences.

I can also guarantee lots of fun and interesting people at both conferences!

GCDS over

It's over. Sitting here in the lobby of my hotel, contemplating a swim. Still a bit tired of all the writing and running around, but generally satisfied with the whole thing.

I've been playing catch up to my backlog of email and blogs. Almost done. Now on to some more writing and wrestling through the businesscards and other stuff.

(ok that was 2 days ago - forgot to finish and publish the blog. So I'll just continue)

This time I'm in my hotel room. Just had Japanese food with Kenny - interesting, as usual. Yesterday we took a car and drove through the center of the island, stopping a few times to admire the view. We also climbed some big rock to the highest point of the island. That was fun (and I got a bit sunburned). Kenny was less lucky, aside from the sunburn his cold got worse and his left ear has issues with the differences in air pressure. I hope for him it gets better before he boards the plane...


The rock from a distance


Rock a lot closer :D

None of my pics actually gives a reasonable impression of the actual size of that thing (hint: in the previous pic, you wouldn't be able to see a human standing next to it...) but I do have a photo showing the view standing at the feet of the rock:





Spot kenny ;-)

I'm working on some more geeky blog stuff, but that'll have to wait a bit - I think I deserved some relaxation after all the running around I did last week.

BTW you might have noticed that Troy is back working on promo stuff - first articles are online already, and more is on the way.

another more geeky thing, I agree with Richard: Moblin "We don't have menus, we think they're useless" 2 is seriously awesome! Great performance and a very interesting take on small-screen interfaces. Seems very usable. The more technical among you might say Intel would've done it faster and cheaper by choosing 'the right technology' (probably starting with a Q or a K) but the enduser in me thinks "bullocks: I couldn't care less, it works great!". That doesn't mean I don't like the stuff notmart and the others are doing, btw ;-) I do think they should probably have a very good look at Moblin.

How Cute of Nokia!

First of all, greetings from the beautiful country of Jamaica!!! I'm here to help prepare Camp KDE, and as such, enjoying good company and great weather...

Yeah, about that company. I'm amazed by Jamaican hospitality. For me, dutch, being rather crude & simple folks, it makes me feel uncomfortable. My host gave me his bed, and made me breakfeast. Even cut the fruit in pieces - last person who did that whas my mom, and that was a long time ago. Hmmm. When I have a friend over, I trow a matress on the floor and tell him where the kitchen is... How's that for a different culture?!?

And about the weather, well, here's a photo I just took from the window of this apartment. Should tell ya enough ;-)



During all the travelling I did I thought about the news from Nokia. Most of the readers probably know what I’m talking about. Nokia just made clear how committed they are to KDE and Qt, and to open development. The impact of this could potentially be huge. On one hand, I doubt many current customers will stop paying Qt Software for their product, despite the fact they can use it for free. Many of them will probably be glad to not have to manage licenses anymore but they will continue to pay for support.

There is a world of customers out there that are probably willing to pay for Qt – yet still have to be convinced. And it’ll be a lot easier to convince them now they can use Qt in their proprietary product for free. In time, they can become supporting customers and thus further development of what’s already the best toolkit in the world ;-)

Of course this is the last push for those who didn’t want to use Qt “because it was not free” (and for who GPL wasn’t good enough?!?). Now there are no more excuses not to use the best technology available. Personally I was completely fine with the GPL license – no free development of proprietary software, contribute either code or money. Well, with Nokia’s resources Qt development doesn’t fully depend on that income anymore, so I guess it’s not a big issue.

For KDE this might be nice as well – “Qt Everywhere” is of course good for us, more potential users of our development framework and more people who know of our technology.

But imho the closer cooperation Nokia would like to see between the KDE community and Qt Software is potentially much more important than the new license. The license, as far as I’m concerned, is a message of welcoming cooperation to the community. We’d love to see development open up, naturally. There are patches circling around in the KDE community, and more importantly, ideas and creativity. I’m sure there are people who would love to take a stab at certain Qt code. And there might very well be commercial clients of Qt who are interested in such a thing as well. This brings them in contact with KDE – we can use input from commercial parties. We’d love to know their needs and requirements, and collaborate with them on making the Qt platform even better.

In time, closer collaboration between Qt and KDE could result in a more smooth ride for code from the KDE libraries into Qt libraries – until now, that has always been difficult.

Exciting times. Not just for us in Jamaica or the KDE community around the world, but for the whole Free Software World at large. I believe without superior technology like Qt the Free Desktop doesn’t stand much of a chance. Being free, no matter how important to many, is not a very strong argument for everybody, and the KDE and Qt technology offers us a chance of simply being better than the competition.

I'll be going from Kingston to Negril today, by bus - sun, sightseeing and again good company as Roger will be going with me.