Akonadi/KMail issues on Tumbleweed?

So if you, like me, have experienced how smoothly Akonadi deals with crashes and think it is still annoying, there's a solution. The problem is caused by Xapian which creates some nice backtraces but until it is fixed you are stuck with a crash every ~minute.

The solution is in this email from Christian Boltz:

I created a repo with the previous version of libxapian, and akonadi-* and baloo linkpac'd from Factory (so rebuilt against the old libxapian): https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/home:cboltz:branches:openSUSE:Factory

Packages at http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cboltz:/branches:/openSUSE:/Factory/standard/

Since I installed these packages (using zypper dup --from), I didn't see any akonadi crashes.

If someone wants to use the fixed packages _now_: I'll keep the repo as long as it's useful for me ;-) -> this is clearly caused by the libxapian update (libxapian22 -> libxapian30)

In other words, you fix it this way:

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cboltz:/branches:/openSUSE:/Factory/standard akonadi-fix
zypper ref
zypper lr
Now find the number of the new repository (akonadi-fix) and:
zypper dup --from 4
(where 4 is the number of the repo in my case).

Then OK the result and done, the mail client which, despite all its issues, continues to be the only one I can stand working with is smooth sailing again ;-)

Oh, to fix the mess Xapian made of the database, you probably should stop akonadi and remove the search DB, it will get re-indexed:
akonadictl stop
rm -rf ~/.local/share/akonadi/search_db
rm ~/.config/.baloorc
akonadictl start


Greetings from #Akademy2016 by the way!

Akademy and openSUSE Conference

It's been a insane 7-8 days. Starting with Akademy, where I gave just one talk but still have notes on 5 or 6 sessions to send to the mailing lists, followed up with the openSUSE conference where I give 3 workshops, 3 talks and a keynote, luckily not all unique or alone. The latter is still happening, I just wanted to share some thoughts ;-)

Akademy...

... was awesome as always. I really like that the community is moving forward with thinking about the future. The manifesto is of course a first step but there were BoF sessions talking about the position of KDE e.V. and how it relates to other projects which might want to join us or that we work with; and I ran a session with Valorie and Peter on how to deal with the dark side of community - the least fun moments. (I'll mail to the community ML about this)

Now I am aware that some of these things don't move as quickly as many would like. The manifesto is great but also excluding projects and people many of us actually don't want to exclude. And I bet that beyond that there is even more room for KDE e.V. to play a role, say in helping other FOSS organizations handle GSOC money or even more. Or think about our relationship to Qt...

Meanwhile, I'm of course still concerned with the Marketing side of things. At my presentation I put forward some strategic thoughts from the KDE Marketing Workgroup in this area and there was some good feedback, also in the BoF session about this. If you're on the promo list you can expect mail some time next week.

And many thanks to Carl and everybody at Akademy in helping getting articles out on the dot! It was real team work and that does not only lead to better results but is also a whole lot more fun... Awesome!

openSUSE Conference

Like Akademy, I spend the first oSC day running around, talking to people. And having a few more hours of meeting-with-the-board than I care for. The keynote by Georg however was a great start of the day (see article on news) and I must say the Greeks have outdone, well, everybody. There is a lot of creativity and fun everywhere - from the beach ball shooting (at the audience...) in the welcoming talk to the small pools outside, the style of the event is just awesome. Lots of fun.

On the content side, I really enjoyed talk by Alexjan Carraturo. He pointed out many hard issues with promoting Linux in Italy. And he's an excellent speaker, too - his English might be a tad Italian but it is not hard to follow and his presentation and slides are awesome. Most importantly, he brings up a lot of real excellent, interesting issues which the local team bumps into. From political and economical to social. They have found very creative solutions like the 'openSUSE Live USB station' where people can put in a USB stick and get their live openSUSE on it or using bare ARM board to draw people into the booth.

Max Huang (sakana) gave a great talk on how things are going in Taiwan - amazingly much better. Where Alexjan brought up the many troubles he and his fellow Geekos (and tuxies and more) run into, Max seems almost exhausted by the many open source events taking place in Taiwan! He showed some impressive numbers and facts about what is going on in Asia - clearly, that's where we, as FOSS community, need to put more focus.

Before these two ambassadors sharing their experience, Richard and myself spoke about new directions in the ambassador program and merchandising handling. Of course there were many, many more talks but I haven't seen that many and the above did catch my attention mostly because this is the area I care strongly about...

Currently I'm listening to the openSUSE Board talk about technical directions for openSUSE in response to a question. SUSE has some ideas on that and is sharing those with the community at this event, which is an interesting experience.

oSC isn't over yet and there is much more to come, I look forward to much of that ;-)

(edit: fixed some stupidity with names, I wrote this too quickly)

Akademy for everybody

About six weeks from now the yearly KDE conference 'Akademy' will kick off in Bilbao, Spain! Looking forward to that. I had to ramble a bit on why I think it's worth going there. And a tip for if you still have to book!

Have not booked yet?

Aw, I was late, and I'm paying the price, in terms of money and convenience. There's work and family and in my case a dose of always-lateness with this stuff that got in the way. Probably not different for others. But keep in mind - I never met anybody who who was sorry they went through the trouble of going to Akademy! It's worth it...

Relevant

Akademy is relevant, useful and fun above and beyond just another Free Software event. Seriously. Even in a world of Android, KDE still builds major Free Desktop stuff. Think about Krita going places lately. Think about how KDE PIM still is arguably the only serious Free enterprise-ready mail-calendar-etc solution on the market. There is plenty more at the event: KParts might get a successor, we move forwards with new task-centered UI paradigms, we move to new devices and more.

Directions

Akademy is important for setting directions. We don't all agree on where KDE is going and that's why we meet. To SET goals and CHECK expectations. That is hard to do over mailing lists, blogs, social media and all that - so we need to talk in person. We're doing new things and it takes a while, often a long while, to get stuff together. We have to address misconceptions, improve common understanding, find out why we disagree. And this works, we're making progress! Nepomuk is now getting the love it needed and same for KDE PIM, the Plasma team can finally implement their ambitious plans without the technical limitations of old thanks to QMLv2 and openGL etc etc.

And I'm betting that those who think KDE is doing the wrong thing actually have arguments and reasons for that. Are these reasons so vague and unconvincing that nobody will listen? Or would the KDE folk be so stubborn they wouldn't listen to obvious facts? That is either under-estimating who-ever-disagrees or the 300-odd KDE contributors. And both, I think, are undeserving of that.

Family

Akademy is about more than listening to talks or giving them. Even if you haven't had time or motivation to contribute, if you didn't agree with one thing or another or got yelled at by (or did yell at) somebody, does that matter? KDE is family: family has plenty of disagreements and fights, yet in the end, you all hug and make it up to each other, yes? Being at Akademy is not just about learning new things and deciding on the future of what we do (and, to a large degree, where Free Software for end users is going) but it is also about meeting, having energizing and inspiring conversations, learning from each other, sharing great ideas. Something we all enjoy, don't we?

Booking

I'm sure there'll be a lot of people at Akademy but I think that should include you... Now, about the booking. It will be hard to get a hotel room, esp if you need space for two people, I'm afraid... I booked the first 3 days (Thursday-Friday-Saturday) for a painfully high price in the Holiday Inn Express Bilbao and the rest in RÍA DE BILBAO which is far cheaper.

And last but not least, if you're going to Akademy and want to make sure all relevant people are there, be sure to talk to those you'd like to have a chat with, convince them to go! And perhaps add the awesome going to Akademy badges to your blog or website!

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!

Dear KDE Community!

Dear KDE Community,

meet the mailing list where you can now talk about non-technical topics relevant to our community: kde-community. From a debate about our next conference to discussing our collaboration with other organizations and our goals as KDE community, this list is for anything which does not fit on the KDE development lists.

The goals are described clear enough:

The purpose of the mailing list is to provide a place for non-technical information and discussions which are relevant to the KDE community as a whole. All people who consider themselves to be part of the KDE community are invited to join. Conversations on the mailing list are respectful, considerate, polite and constructive following our KDE Code of Conduct.

The list collects announcements, information and results from discussions in other places and offers a place to get feedback on non-technical questions or plans of relevance for the whole KDE community.

As the 'collects announcements, ...' part already hints at, we expect people to try and make a habit of summarizing discussions which do NOT take place in public on this list once a conclusion is reached. This should be the central place for KDE governance debate.

You can find the list and subscribe here.

History lesson

Summer last year Cornelius wrote a blog about setting up a kde-community mailing list. It had been discussed on the KDE e.V. list that it doesn't make much sense that we have no public place to discuss governance related things in KDE.

Most of these discussions take place on the private KDE e.V. mailing list. Mirko Boehm proposed to simply open that list: what is discussed there is relevant to the whole KDE community. While there was agreement on the principle of opening up, there are things which are discussed there that probably should not be open. They are few and far between but some discussions about financial or personal matters do benefit from a less public place. Some argued that public discussions can also harm our public profile and it came up that bikeshedding could get even worse.

An alternative was proposed by Jos vd Oever: create a new list and put discussions there, unless there is a strong need of keeping them private.

After this, however, the discussion kind'a died out (I am summarizing more than a handful of mails here...). The subject came up at the e.V. board meeting in Berlin and we agreed that there's no good reason to Just Do It™. If nobody likes the idea the list will remain empty. Natural Selection FTW! I went ahead, asked our Amazing Admins to set me up, configured it and made Cornelius and myself admins who will exact our vengeance on everybody we disagree with who misbehaves.

So that's the story. The result is the KDE Community mailing list on the KDE servers. Is it official? What, you active in KDE and you don't know how nonsensical that question is? As always, the list will have to prove itself... I can only ask: please subscribe and bring your non-technical questions, comments, reminders and proposals to this list. We'll yell at the folks on the internal e.V. list if they bring things there which should be public.

And don't forget: if you want to talk to each other in person, this is where you do it. Go and book ;-)

Looking forward to your hugs at Akademy!

Keynote about Open Science

At Akademy, about an hour ago, the keynote by Will Schroeder from Kittware was finished. It was a very nice talk - and I've collected some notes, see below!

What is this thing called science?

After introducing Kitware and what they do ('all things scientific computing related'), Will starts to talk about science: where does it come from?

You might remember this Descartes dude. He questioned everything - and that is where it started. Nullius in Verba, "take nobody's word for it", that was the thought behind this movement.

And realize that this did not go down easily! People where locked up for this, faced jail time for their convictions. They were the hackers of their time, trying new things, finding new ways. And sharing knowledge.

Because that is what science was (and should be) all about. The way it worked was as follows:
A scientist wrote a paper, a letter. This would go to the Royal Society or another 'science institution'. There the experiments were replicated and verified. Once verified, the letter, paper or book was replicated and distributed through society.

Things changed since then

But commerce took over and now, the process goes from scientist to commercial publisher where volunteers do peer review and then the article gets published in a journal.

This looks like the same process, but it is not. First of all - in reality, replication of experiments does not happen. There is a number of reasons for that, some practical (huge computational requirements, growth time of tissue samples) but often it is also lacking data, details on how the experiment works or closed, unavailable software or procedures.

The thirst for {fame\power|control|money} has tainted science: we've lost the search for truth. It is "publish or persih", career pressure is huge and scientists are afraid to share knowledge because it might loose them a paper or even patents and licensing income.

Meanwhile, according to a case study, licensing revenue on patents is about 2 billion, but if you substract the costs the university breaks even. And the push for patents is corrupting and damaging science and creates resistance to collaboration.

The results

And it shows: Nature published a study showing that more than 90% of papers in science journals describing 'landmark' breakthroughs in preclinical cancer research are NOT reproducible and are thus just plain wrong.

Will gives a computational science/medical imaging example. It is quite complicated - but boils down to the fact that we can't reproduce the result because we lack knowledge of how it was obtained.

So there is a huge pressure on scientists to do bad science and nobody checks up on the results. Meanwhile, journals take easily 2 years and hundreds of euro's to publish their articles and you also have to pay thousands to read the results - which were peer reviewed by volunteers!

Our data is unavailable or put in proprietary formats, publishers control the flow of information and closed and proprietary software is used to do analysis and controls how scientists work.

What we need

What we need is open science: open access to knowledge, open access to data and open access to source.

It is a real tragedy that we have to put the word 'open' in front of science!

But we have to. Science, part of this three hundred years old tradition of hacking and sharing knowledge, has been corrupted and locked up.

The good news is that things are changing. Universities realize that the status quo does not benefit society and change their policies. Harvard now asks professors to publish in open access journals and the UK is going to only fund research which ends up in the open.

Of course, we already knew that: both society and business show a clear trend. Open is better and will take over closed!


note that these are personal notes and not reviewed: no guarantees about the correctness!

keynote by Agustin Benito Bethencourt at Akademy

Agustin wanted to talk about success. Times are a tad uncertain now - in the economy, in software and in the KDE ecosystem. It's good to be aware of how well we've been doing over the last 15 years and how well we are positioned for the next decades!

Success story 1

Active patience

We now have an open development process around Qt. Once upon a time, nobody believed that to be even remotely possible - it was not even free software. But we knew how the Qt people wanted the things we wanted and we had the patience to wait and quietly keep pushing. And now - the unexpected happened. This will have a pervasive effect on our infrastructure. We (and others!) can now more easily take Qt in other directions, do new things!

The lesson is, in the words of a Chinese proverb: Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still.

Success story 2

Magister

KDE is first class in getting new, young people involved and educating them. Our contributors are from a variety of cultures, students or established developers - we all work and learn together. And being involved in KDE you learn a lot. Once you start working in companies you will notice how much you've learned in KDE. And that should make you confident that those who will take over in the future, also part of this community, will be ready for it.

Success story 3

Efficiency

As a 'loose' bunch of volunteers, we're doing incredible work. Most companies in 'our business' do a far worse job at developing products with often far more resources.

Success story 4

Leadership

We're becoming better and better at becoming business incubators. More and more entrepreneurs step up in KDE and start new, cool, innovative businesses. We're proud to be part of a community where innovations can go somewhere!

Success story 5

Vision

We're capable of developing and executing on a vision. Take KDE 4! We've embarked on that vision seven (!!) years ago and today - while it is not perfect yet - we've gotten very close. Most of the plans we decided on are implemented and have come into reality. All that without investments of millions and millions by large companies. We did the impossible!

There are people out there who have their own ideas and projects and who want to be part of KDE, develop under our umbrella, our vision and who join us. This tells us we're on a path to a bright future: we're not just open to people, but there are projects outside who recognize our clear vision and the fact that we deliver.

Success story 6

Experience Innovating
People see how hard it is to stay in the tech business for a long time. You see that with many companies. Yet, we're 15 years old, yet we are still doing new, innovative things. What we do is completely different from what we did, but we still do it with the same spirit and energy than when we started. And Agustin is confident that in 10 years we'll still be approaching entirely new challenges with that same energy!

KDE's future depends basically on US.

These 6 examples (and we haven't even talked about design, the project and code, design or many other things) tell you something about KDE: we have a bright future!

We've gotten to a point in which most limitations we're facing come from inside, things we need to and can change. Not from outside but under our control! There is little out there that can stop us from being successful for another 15 years!

(Agustin holding a Plasma Active tablet) Innovation does happen right here!

Akademy talk about release management

Just watched a talk by Kolabsys dude Jeroen "I have an opinion" van Meeuwen on release management

Jeroen van Meeuwen had some harsh criticism on the way KDE handles Q&A with Bugzilla. He has taken on bugzilla maintainership after someone told him there was no 'single throat to choke', and started to investigate the current state and how it is used by KDE. He presents his findings and suggestions on improvements.

There's no defined process - and that shows. Bugs linger around forever. There are bugs from 2002 which have not been asigned to anyone or confirmed in any way. Worse, the 'final' state we use in KDE, 'resolved', is not, and should not be, the final state of a bug! After fixing a bug, there is testing, confirming and releasing still to do before the bug should be allowed to fall off our radar.

Due to Bugzilla not working as it should, we work with other tools to keep a list of what to do. Reviewboard is an example and many developers have their own list. All that while Bugzilla is more than capable of doing this!

Jeroen talked about how we, as a community, should try to adapt a new process with bugzilla. For that, our setup needs some improvements and he's offering to work on those.

Specifics include having proper types, a 'CLOSED' state and cleaning up products. An example of the latter is that there are two products for 'KMail': 'kmail' and 'kmail2'. Both are open for bug submissions - and there are lots of bugs coming in for the 'old' kmail, adding to the almost 3000 open bugs. However, the developers don't work on kmail anymore: they have all moved to kmail2. How to solve this? Resolve the current unresolved tickets and tell users to move to kmail2. Then close kmail and then move kmail2 to kmail.

Jeroen explained how we can use tools like jared and jenkins to automatically run tests, check if things compile for a certain branch and things like that. How we need to differentiate between Q&A, Triaging, Development and release engineering.

Jeroen proposes to go through the following steps:

• do a bugzilla cleanup
  
  have to contact project developers and ask them what they do with the tickets, then adopt the tickets and setup to that reality.
• formulate and propose standardized use of tickets parameters
  
  help explain how you can use bugzilla as a todo queue
• align documented process and establish responsibilities
• align use of versions/milestones with source code management
• mass-updating tickets through sysadmin requests
• offer one throat to choke

Jeroen realizes he's new to KDE and that he's not the only one who (thinks he) is an expert. Also, KDE works on consensus - so it'll take effort and discussions to get a new way of working in.

There'll be a BOF about QA and triaging on Monday so if you're interested, look at the BoF schedule.

A big take-away from me is that this should actually make development easier, more focussed and more fun - it's not about creating a lot of process to bother developers.

CLS, DS, COSCUP... Plasma Active, ARM, ...

It's been quite a while since I wrote a decent blog and it might be a while longer until I really get to it. I do have a lot to write about, however. First about the Community Leadership Summit - the notes of which I'd like to turn into a few blogs. Second, the Desktop Summit, which was awesome. And third my trip to Taiwan. Finally the upcoming openSUSE conference which is going to be awesome. But let me get the most important stuff out of the way first.

Desktop Summit Awesomeness

At the Desktop Summit (which imho was a great success) I organized 3 food cooking parties where we made some Asian-inspired curries. I've put the recipes on-line for those who asked for it. Find them on the Desktop Summit Food page.

At those cooking evenings we had between 25 and 30 people join us each night. It was big fun, we had good food (and beer and more) and I really intend to do it again next time. As a matter of fact, I hope to do the cooking again at the openSUSE Conference. And remember - if you don't use openSUSE that doesn't mean you can't come and enjoy the company, food and discussions about all kinds of things. See for yourself in the detailed program. You can also learn how IO travels in the kernel, how to use the mtux console multiplexer, the sessions about GIT, cross-cultural communication, GCC and Kernel stuff and more. And that's just stuff from day one, we have about 100 sessions in 4 days.

Talking about cool stuff, on Tuesday we'll have an 8-bit music workshop... Seriously, I look forward to that. If you want to join, hurry up, the conf takes place September 11-14!

!Fail

Taipei and Plasma Active

Last week I made a trip to Taiwan to meet the openSUSE community there. There's quite a bunch and they did awesome at the booth at COSCUP. Really cool. We had lots of interesting stuff there, flyers, geeko's, stickers, USB sticks and Aaron left his Plasma Active tablet (runs openSUSE, of course) at the booth a few times. That thing drew quite a crowd - and rightly so. I hadn't seen that much of it but Plasma Active is really something very interesting. It's a unique touch tablet UI, yet easy to use and intuitive. Build in just a few months it's amazing to see how well it works already. The team aims to stabilize it in the next few months and I'm absolutely certain it will result in a pretty darn impressive product.

Aaron spoke quite a bit about how well the Open Build Service works for them during development. The team works closely with an interaction designer and obviously she's not such a hugely technical person. With a traditional development process someone would have to do packages for her - or she'd have to learn how to check out a repository and then compile and install stuff herself. Thanks to OBS, packages are build continuously and very easy - a dev checks some code in and the next day the designer can give feedback! Continuous build services are not unique of course but they usually don't come easily, don't produce packages, etc. build.opensuse.org has an easy web interface, can build for all major Linux distro's and architectures (yes, including ARM) and is of course entirely free.run it in-house,

I'm quite proud that openSUSE proves to be so successful for the Plasma Active team. They also build packages for MeeGo, as they want to support ARM systems. I know several openSUSE contributors want to have ARM in openSUSE, well, Plasma Active is at the openSUSE conference so we can meet and talk about it there...

Anyhow. So Taiwan was fun. You can find some pics of COSCUP on flickr and I have an image of two of my hosts as well as fellow visitor Aaron below :D

You'll probably find all three of them at the openSUSE conference too, btw.

DS call for participation: BoF's and Workshops

The Desktop Summit schedule for the talks and presentations has been published a couple of weeks ago. Now Jon announced that it's time to start sending in sessions for workshops, BOF's and hack/teaching sessions! The dot has a more extensive announcement.

The important points:

All forms of hands-on activities that aim to further the Free Desktop are welcomed. Examples of such sessions include BoF, project and cross-project meetings, workshops, hacking sessions and training/teaching sessions. Each session is self-organized and it is up to the hosts and participants to decide if the session is to be loosely oriented around a set of topics, or have a well-defined agenda.

Each session is meant to be open to anyone who is interested, if you want to organize a closed session on a subject, contact the organisation (details below). We encourage participants to make use of the fact that the Desktop Summit will bring together people from several different communities, and the unique opportunities this creates.

And:

The deadline for pre-registered sessions is July 3rd. Sessions registered before this time will be scheduled by the organization team between July 3rd and July 10th.

For sessions registered after this date, attendees themselves are responsible for finding a time and location for the session. Rooms will be available for this for the duration of the Workshop & BoF days, and the wiki can be used to coordinate.

This means that if you schedule in advance we can make sure there is no overlap between these sessions or talks and that the order makes sense. For example, first a talk introducing QML, then a workshop on QML & Plasma, then a hack session to write some applets. If you don't schedule now, you run the risk of having a BoF at 9 in the morning the day after a party, too :D

Note that obviously, you can't be sure yet about the topic of some sessions. Especially BoF's are supposed to be about relevant, recent things. So you're not expected to have a perfect topic yet, a rough outline is enough!

Now, go forth and shoot in a BoF, workshop or similar Read-Write session!

The Collaboration Imperative

As you might have noticed, there is a little bit of a brush-up between GNOME and Canonical with KDE involved from the sidelines (just read Planet GNOME). Dave wrote a reasonable summary of this and so did Jeff Waugh in his series on the relationship between Canonical and GNOME. In three sentences:

Let's have a fight

Canonical gets a lot of criticism for creating a fork of the GNOME experience with Unity, instead of contributing upstream to GNOME Shell. Canonical responds that Unity was meant to be a GNOME project and their contributions are being blocked (giving libindicators as example). Suddenly Aaron Seigo from KDE weighted in, saying GNOME is indeed hard to work with.

I've been reading up on it and to some extend participating in the discussion on identi.ca. As you know, I'm interested in the subject of collaboration and this is a case where it clearly didn't work out for a variety of reasons. In this blog I won't try to weight in on the topic itself but rather argue that the psychological construct of "the fundamental attribution error" can explain much of the conflict and how to avoid it.

But let's start with a sample of the discussion.

forming an opinion

I'm not exactly the type of person who makes up his mind easily. And the stories that came out of this debate were highly conflicting and confusing. According to this, Canonical discourages its employees from contributing upstream. However, Aaron claims GNOME does not WANT to collaborate. And Mark blogs:

Jeff also goes on to talk about Ted and Aurelien, who were proposing the app indicators work in GNOME and KDE respectively. KDE apps worked smoothly, Gnome rejected Ted’s proposal.

I say opinions are cool!

So GNOME is uncooperative? Or does Canonical not get it, as Dave claimed? Is KDE just pushing things without listening? Depends on your point of view - the facts are vague. Read for example this thread on freedesktop.org about the StatusNotifier (systray) spec - there is about a 50% chance you'll decide KDE is the uncooperative one... This thread was referenced several times as proof Party X was inflexible and rude - where X was sometimes GNOME and sometimes KDE!

Makes you wonder what is going on...

So what is real?

A few days ago I had a call with Jeff Waugh. He offered to talk in a dent and I'm glad he did. Of course, as usual the whole situation is more complicated than what you can discuss in 140 characters on twitter. The talk was very enlightening and made me think of a psychological concept.

Call it a family trait...

The fundamental attribution error

People tend to attribute what happens around us in the world to intentions. We believe things happen for a reason. This is quite a strong human tendency already present in very young children. Put a 3 year old in front of a room where stones are moved around by some invisible means like magnets. Ask the kid what is going on and he or she will describe the events in the room in terms of "the blue stone wants to talk to the red one". We know stones usually don't really want a lot - so why does the child perceive such intentions? This phenomenon not only forms the base of early religions (attributing 'intentions' to weather, trees or growth of crops) but also results in making conflicts worse. Psychologists call it "the fundamental attribution error" and it is fundamental (hence the name) to our perception of the world.

So the reality is, besides that stones and trees don't have 'goals' and 'intentions', that often things happen for other reasons than someone having the intent to do that specific thing. Or in English, if a specification gets critical comments - maybe the respondent might have had other reasons than just wanting to be a jerk. Like being busy, tired or having misunderstood/missed a part of the discussion.

Reality?

Reality applied

The talk with Jeff made clear that the major reason for GNOME not supporting the systemtray spec was timing, not lack of interest The focus of the GNOME project right now is understandably narrow: get GNOME 3 out the door. Something like interoperability, no matter how important, is not on top of the agenda. Jeff said he expects the FD.o systray spec to be supported hopefully in GNOME 3.2! The lesson: sometimes things interfere with cooperation. And the 'other camp', blissfully unaware of the real reasons behind lack of response or rude behavior, attributes it to a lack of willingness and support.

As another example, take the adoption of the Galago (notification) specification and what went wrong according to this message by John Palmieri. And about GNOME and Canonical having misunderstandings: Stuart Jarvis blogged how hard understanding a Free Software community can be.

Now I'm not going to attempt to unravel all the events that led to this blog as that would simply be impossible. Nor will I attempt to figure out 'who is to blame' as that's pointless (and wrong anyway, as I argued above). What I can do is ask those involved to think about the fundamental attribution error: if someone looks funny at you, it doesn't mean they hate you. They might have something stuck in their eye!

*snap*

Actions

Ok, so maybe the others don't hate you. That doesn't solve the problem - yet. We all need to step up and do something. What?

Make collaboration an explicit focus

I wrote about collaboration before and at FOSDEM there was a cross-distro-collaboration discussion. As I said there, a big blocker for more openness is that we simply don't think about collaboration. We need to be aware of the opportunities for and benefits of collaboration. The whole discussion that I started this blog with might be negative and things are all a bit tense right now, but it shines the spotlight on something that needs attention! And positive initiatives like Appstream are happening. As Seif Lotfy wrote on his blog:

And if you haven’t noticed we are working with GNOME Shell, Unity and KDE. So a sense of collaboration is possible ;)

It just needs us to take notice! So, Mark, maybe blog about Appstream? It's using Ubuntu Software Center for the GNOME side, after all... Let's also focus on the positive projects!

Talk together face to face!

It is important to talk about concerns and frustrations. Considering the distance Brazil-Australia the best Jeff and I could do was a phone call but it was certainly enlightening. And I bet that you'll notice the same when you finally get to talk to those you've been fighting with on IRC and mailing lists for so long... Even then, realize that one single person does not define his or her whole project. Not everyone in KDE is as jumpy as Aaron; not everyone in GNOME is as French as Vincent Untz. It is important to share the results of a chat as well - blog about it (if your blog is aggregated on your projects' planet), or add results to a wiki or commit logs etcetera. Make sure the positive results persist!

Allison wrote he also wants to start a bit of a discussion in the cross-desktop area which I welcome and support. Sounds like something which could make an impact and Allison, if you want my help, let me know what I can do.

Time for a group hug?

Take advantage of events to meet

Don't overlook the opportunity to meet at events. For example, there is the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit in San Fransisco in a few weeks. It is co-located with Camp KDE which seems to me an excellent opportunity for stakeholders to get together. Go a few days before the Collaboration Summit starts so you can get some face to face time with desktop folks.

Then of course in August, there is the Desktop Summit. I'm one of the organizers and while collaboration isn't always perfect, the team has a common goal: organize a great event! Like the previous Desktop Summit in Gran Canaria I hope we can make some steps forward. This Desktop Summit will have collaboration even higher on its agenda than the last one and I hope this will have positive effects.

Doing more, moving forward

There certainly is more we can do to solve the conflicts. With apologies for the irony here, more blogs trying to analyze the whole thing may simply be fueling the flames more than extinguish them. Talking to people works better. I don't claim there was no talk, there was. However, much communication we do happens over the web. And as we are all aware, that can easily lead to misunderstandings. So the face to face meetings I suggest, as well as an awareness of biases like the fundamental attribution error, can contribute to solving these conflicts in a more effective manner. As long as the results get documented in a few (public!) places and as such don't get forgotten the results of such meetings can be good and long lasting!

Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

Personally, I'll stay away from the subject now - I've dented, tweeted and now blogged enough about it. I'll focus on the positive - including the Desktop Summit. And making sure the next openSUSE conference will have as much of a collaborative atmosphere as the last one!

Dude... Akademy Rocks!

/me likes Finland.

It's clean and the people are reasonably nice; quality of food is good, the nature is beautiful, plenty wifi. If only things weren't so expensive...

This Akademy has to the most smoothest sailing KDE conference so far. The local team did an amazing job - I've heard several others notice this, it's quite clear. The whiteboard with the 'add some comments' is a cool idea, even more so is the thing with four smileys which you can use to express your feelings when you walk by.

And watching the game is really really cool. Tonight - Spain vs Germany! Last night NL kicked the last piece of South America out ;-)
Sorry dudes :D

Akademy 2010 started

Yay, sitting here in the big room listening to a MeeGo talk by Valtteri. He's not exactly the business type I expected, btw, he doesn't even wear a suit... For somebody who's a 'director' he looks rather normal ;-)

So yes, the trip was just fine - I expected to travel alone but ended up in the "Akademy flight". From NL to Helsinki we were with about 5 people, from Helsinky to Tampere the airplane had almost 50% Akademy visitors... Nice timing.

The party was great, and I enjoyed the 2-1 vs Brazil, but didn't get drunk as my belly decided to step in and tell me to go back to the hotel. I'm getting used to my lack of intelligence when it comes to handling my body... Eating almost nothing for a full day during the traveling, then having a few beers, then eating way to fast and too much. I do it every darn time...

And now I'm hungry as I didn't manage to find breakfast.

Luckily there will be lunch soonish and I also look forward to meeting the other promo peeps, walking around, talking to people I haven't seen in a while, listening to talks and all the stuff one typically does at the coolest conference in the year.

And of course I'm going...

Everybody is prancing around with their 'I'm going to Akademy' pretty pictures. I don't want to be left behind, so...


Edit: and thanks to our sponsors and the supporting members, I'm sponsored to go there - wouldn't be able to visit otherwise so thank you again!

Announcements at Akademy

If you're a participant of Akademy, speaker or not, and you have any news you want to announce @ akademy: please please give the promo people a heads-up! Either now (mail kde-promo, dot-editors or one of us privately) or come to the press room at Akademy. It will help us prepare it, and help you get a cool announcement out with good timing (eg not at the same time as another big announcement, for example).

Think about it!

Help KDE promo!

Hi all,

Again a little call for help...

Pretty picture
Soon, there will be a new release of our bunch'o'stuff ("KDE SC 4.5). We need a pretty picture for our blogs ;-)

Writing
If you're a writer, we're always looking for new authors. I've often have magazines ask me if I know anyone, you can even make a buck that way. Let me know!

book
The KDE promo team has worked on a booklet with information about the KDE community and our products for a long time. It's mostly done but needs 2 things: someone to push for finishing it, and someone to do layouting. If interested in either or both these tasks, let me know...

openhatch
Some of you might know Openhatch. It's a cool way to help people get involved in FOSS projects. We do have a little presence there, but there could be a lot more. Anyone up for being the official openhatch manager? Contact kde-promo to coordinate ;-)

Promo at Akademy

Hi all,

As you might have read, Lydia wrote about some ways of following what will be going on at Akademy. See, we do stuff ;-)

So the promo team has been working to prepare for Akademy. We've tried to get articles out every once in a while, get in contact with magazines and journalists etc. Meanwhile we are also working on a press kit (a first, afaik) and will try to take good care of our journalists. We'll have a press conference on the first day with the keynote speakers and of course we'll be working on the usual dot articles and other communication channels.

Meanwhile, we've had more plans than what we could finish (as usual). And we'll be needing help at Akademy itself as well. Someone needs to be in the press room, we need help doing interviews and dot articles and keep twitter & other media up to date.

Also I'm looking for a 'dedicated' photographer who will make sure we have plenty of good pictures readily available for us (flickr, the dot etc) and for our journalists.

So if anyone feels he/she could help out, let me know!

about akademy 2009

-> some ramblings from short after Akademy I still hadn't published ;-)
----------------------------------

Yesterday we put the impression article online, and I have to get something of my chest about that one.

Don't mis-understand me, this meeting has been great. There sure are things which could have been better, but hey, can you expect to put 800 ppl to work in one place and expect everything to be perfect?

It's just that I (we) had to be a bit politically correct in the article, so I want to clarify a few sentences for those who did stay home. Note that this is ENTIRELY personal, my opinion, and probably mean towards some people.

"Negative voices are few and far between, at least on the KDE side, and even those who do not value the cross-desktop cooperation see advantages in this larger meeting."

In other words, many KDE people have really been appreciative of the joint meeting. They were interested in joint and GNOME technology. The things said during the KDE e.V. meeting were very positive and all except like 3 ppl voted for a joint meeting next year.

But apparently at least some (important/influencial) ppl on the GNOME side think different. A big issue seems money: the joint conference means sharing revenue. This is even mentioned in the poll about a joint conference on the GNOME site. Personally I don't see the relevance in light of the great things we accomplished... But knowing the financial situation at their side I guess it's to be expected.

Another thing was the organisation - way too much ended up on the shoulders of our people like Kenny and Claudia. I think that's unfair. Now they apologized for that, but it is something we'd have to do better if we do this joint meeting thing again. BTW Stormy did a lot for the event, esp in the sponsors area. And I'm sure there is enough blame for everyone, not just on the Gnome side (actually I myself should've gotten involved in an earlier stage, the PR would've been better if I had).

But the above is not black and white. I was pleasantly surprised by the attitude Collabora people, the Tracker and Zeitgeist developers and many more. There might also have been KDE people unfriendly towards our gnomy friends (I hope not, and have not seen any such behaviour).

"There are tensions too admittedly, not everyone was appreciative of our primary sponsor, but the conference has acted as a real focus to break down such attitudes."

What happened is that at the first Gnome keynote someone introducing the speaker basically told the audience to put a GNOME foot sticker over the logo of the biggest sponsor, Nokia's Qt. An act I described initially as 'childish'. I do however understand it - imagine that a few minutes before that Quim Gil told the conference audience Maemo would move to Qt. And imagine you work professionally on GTK, getting your business from Nokia... I do however think it was very unprofessional by the person introducing the speakers to say such a thing.

Ok, enough complaining. I can think of other things I was unhappy/disappointed about but that'll have to wait for another time. Besides, there was enough good stuff there as well. And things to improve (also for myself). I hope I managed to keep this reasonable (I tried) and not too offending. And I'm open to input - as always.

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.

GCDS day whatever

GCDS is continuing. The party Monday night was very quiet for me, and I noticed many other people being rather quiet as well. Guess we should have at least one day between parties so people can gain their strength back.

Anyway. Lots of stuff going on here. We've moved to the university. It's hot here, no airco. But power and a cable for every chair - very good network. I'm now listening to Gokmen who's talking about Pardus and KDE integration. On my left there is Jonathan with a beach pic of him and our BUGSQUAD mistress (we all know who she is...).

Yesterday the two PR ppl (Thomas Keup, GNOME and me) planned a cross-desktop marketing meeting. Well, it was initially planned for Thursday morning, then moved to Tuesday. Me being slightly off on Monday, I failed to notice there was the KDE e.V. meeting. No cross-desktop meeting after all.

We did have some interesting discussions while we planned the bof, and I'll try to put some of the ideas we had here (or rather, MY interpretation, don't go and kick Thomas for what I say).

The goal we have is to get a bottom-up approach in marketing for the Free Desktop. As both KDE and GNOME can do this, we wanted to discuss this together. This is not about technical plans or roadmaps - it is about getting people enthusiastic and get them to spread the word about what they love.

That's basically the point - love. Why do we love KDE or GNOME? Those reasons are different for everyone, but often emotional rather than rational. This is a well known fact - how do you get people to believe you? Focus on emotion rather than ration. So we need to know what emotions we feel and convey them to others.

According to research there are 5 important areas people are sensitive to these days:
- Persionalisation
- Emotionalisation
- Simplicity
- Eco-awareness
- Austerity (less is more)

To keep things simple, I'll group this into three, cuz personally that's how I feel about these:
Personal
Simple
Good

So how does KDE make you happy in these area's?

For me, one of the strongest points of KDE is how personal it is - you can make it look and work any way you want. Especially plasma is very good in this department. It makes me feel like my laptop is really mine - compare it to putting a sticker on something that's yours, or painting your room, or even picking your own clothes. Wouldn't it be boring if we all were wearing the same grey clothes?

And of course a second part of this is the community - all the great people here are so cool. The new Social Desktop initiative is already bringing the KDE community to your desktop - in KDE 4.3 there is the social desktop widget showing KDE users in your neighborhood! You'd be surprised how many people within 5 kilometers of my home already are testing KDE 4.3 and run this applet.

Simplicity is there in many area's - take network management, it is far easier with the networkmanager plasmoid in KDE than on windows or mac. The same goes for many other things, and I like that a lot.

Finally, I truly believe contributing to Free Software (and just USING is contributing already and makes you a real member of the KDE community) is very important to the world. Thanks to what we do, children in Brazil and other countries all over the world have access to good education. Thanks to what we do the reliance of governments around the world on a small number of large corporations is decreased. Thanks to Free Software computers don't need to be replaced as often and use less power, helping our environment. We spread freedom in China and other countries were freedom is limited. We allow computer users around the world to take back control over their own hardware. After all, in a world where speech depends on software, Free Speech depends on Free Software*.

So. Think about this. Why do you love KDE? What is it that makes you happy? Then go and tell people about it. Tell your boyfriend, tell your girlfriend. Tell your friends, family. Boss, colleagues, competitors. The pizza boy, the cleaning lady. Everyone!

I'd love to hear some blogs about what makes you love KDE!

Another piece of Cool Stuff from GCDS:
Will Stephenson just said he was green (SUSE green, of course) with envy about the work Pardus has done on KDE integration, and he said we, as KDE community, should applaud them for it. And so we did ;-)
(their tools are integrated in plasma and systemsettings, they use KDE things like Solid and Phonon etc etc - really makes for a unique and smooth experience).

There is more talk going on about cross-distro collaboration, getting (more) tools upstream and such. I'd love that ;-)

I' working on two articles for those not here to give an impression of this conference and to tell ya'all about the cross-desktop collaboration, sit tight!


* by Don Marti jr.