Principles

We recently did a post about the Nextcloud Mission and Principles we discussed at the previous Contributor Week. I guess it is mostly the easy-to-agree on stuff, so let me ruin the conversation a bit with the harder stuff. Warning: black and white don't exist beyond this point.

Open Source

In an internal conversation about some community pushback on something we did, I linked to islinuxaboutchoice.com - people often think that 'just' because a product is open source, it can't advertise to them, it has to be chock full of options, it has to be made by volunteers, it can't cost money and so on...

But if you want to build a successful product and change the world, you have to be different. You have to keep an eye on usability. You have to promote what you do - nobody sees the great work that isn't talked about. You have to try and build a business so you can pay people for their work and speed up development. Or at least make sure that people can build businesses around your project to push it forward.

I personally think this is a major difference between KDE and GNOME, with the former being far less friendly to 'business' and thus most entrepreneurial folks and the resources they bring go into GNOME. And I've had beers with people discussing SUSE's business and its relationship with openSUSE - just like Fedora folks must think about how they work with Red Hat, all the time. I think the openSUSE foundation is a good idea (I've pushed for it when I was community manager), but going forward I think the board should have a keen eye on how they can enable and support commercial efforts around openSUSE. In my humble opinion the KDE board has been far to little focused on that (I've ran for the board on this platform) and you also see the LibreOffice's Document Foundation having trouble in this area. To help the projects be successful, the boards on these organizations need to have people on them who understand business and its needs, just like they need to have community members who understand the needs of open source contributors.

But companies bring lots of complications to open source. When they compete (as in the LibreOffice ecosystem), when they advertise, when they push for changes in release cycles... Remember Mark Shuttleworth arguing KDE should adopt a 6-month release cycle? In hindsight, I think we should have!

Principles

So, going back to the list of Nextcloud's Mission and Principles, I say they are the easy stuff, because they are. They show we want to do the right thing, they show what our core motivation was behind starting this company: building a project that helps people regain control over their privacy. But, in day to day, I see myself focus almost exclusively on the needs of business. And you know what, businesses don't need privacy... That isn't why we do this.

Oh, I'm very proud we put in significant effort in home users when we can - our Simple Signup program has cost us a lot of effort and won't ever make us a dime. The Nextcloud Box was, similarly, purely associated with our goals, not a commercial project. Though you can argue both had marketing benefits - in the end, a bigger Nextcloud ecosystem helps us find customers.

I guess that's what keeps me motivated - customers help us improve Nextcloud, more Nextcloud users help us find more customers and so both benefit.

Pragmatism and the real hard questions

Personally, I'd add an item about 'pragmatism' to the list, though you can say it is inferred from our rather large ambitions. We want to make a difference, a real difference. That means you have to keep focused on the goal, put in the work and be pragmatic.

An example is the conversation about github. Would we prefer a more decentralized solution? Absolutely. Are we going to compromise our goals by moving away from the largest open source collaboration network to a platform which will result in less contributions? No.... As long as github isn't making our work actively harder, does not act unethically and its network provides the biggest benefits to our community by helping us reach our goals, we will stay...

More questions and the rabbit hole

Would you buy a list of email addresses to send them information about Nextcloud? No, because it harms those users' privacy and probably isn't even really legal. Would you work with a large network to reach its members, even if you don't like that network and its practices? Yes - that is why we're on Facebook and Twitter, even though we're not fans of either.

Let's make it even harder. How about the choice of who you sell to. Should we not sell to Company X even if that deal would allow us to hire 10 great developers on making Nextcloud better for the whole world and further our goals? Would you work with a company that builds rockets and bombs to earn money for Nextcloud development? We've decided 'nope' a few times already, we don't want that money. But what about their suppliers? And suppliers of suppliers? A company that makes screws might occasionally sell to Boeing which also makes money from army fighters... Hard choices, right?

And do you work with countries that are less than entirely awesome? Some would argue that would include Russia and China, others would say the USA should be on a black list, too... What about Brazil under its current president? The UK? You can't stop anyone from using an open source product anyway, of course... It gets political quick, we've decided to stick to EU export regulations but it's a tough set of questions. Mother Teresa took money from dictators. Should she have? No?

It might seem easy to say, in a very principled way, no to all the above questions, but then your project won't be successful. And your project wants to make the world better, does it not?

Conclusion?

We discuss these things internally and try to be both principled and pragmatic. That is difficult and I would absolutely appreciate thoughts, feedback, maybe links to how other organizations make these choices. Please, post them here, or in the comments section of the original blog. I can totally imagine you'd rather not comment here as this blog is hosted by blogger.com - yes, a Google company. For pragmatic reasons... I haven't had time to set up something else!

There's lots of grey areas in this, it isn't always easy, and sometimes you do something that makes a few people upset. As the Dutch say - **Waar gehakt wordt vallen spaanders**.



PS and if you, despite all the hard questions, still would want to work at a company that tries to make the world better, we're hiring! Personally, I need somebody in marketing to help me organize events like the Nextcloud Conference, design flyers and slide decks for sales and so on... Want to work with me? Shoot me an email!

SCALE14x fun - openSUSE, KDE

Last weekend was SCALE and I had a lot of fun. Thought a report on the KDE/openSUSE presence would be good!


An impression from the trip - as in, Oslo->Los Angelos.


The event started with talks and I even managed to join the keynote by Corey Doctorow before heading to the booth!

openSUSE

If you didn't know it yet, now you do: both the KDE and GNOME booth are organized by openSUSE, and more precisely Booth Master Drew Adams. His energy makes, I think, openSUSE the most active community booth at FOSDEM with about a dozen volunteers (!!!). He keeps bringing in new people, amazing really. The corner booth worked out great though they wanted to try and move the openSUSE booth to be next to the SUSE one (which was sandwiched between Mageia and the FSF). Thinking about it now - it would have made SUSE pale in comparison...

Such a great presence at an event has a real impact in many ways, from introducing people to openSUSE and giving users a chance to chat about it to also showing people the Geeko matters and what it is up to. Plus, it's a great time for the team, too. So, awesome many points for Drew, really. Next time you see him: give him a hug!


The openSUSE Booth where visitors were thought about the Ways of the Geeko: Tumbling and Leaping!

KDE

I asked for volunteers in a blog some weeks ago and the good news is that people stepped up! Scarlett, who's working on becoming a Debian maintainer, as well as her Debian sponsor Diane, both stepped up to help out. Backbone of the booth this year was Barrington Daltrey who hasn't been representing KDE at SCALE for some years but decided to get back in the game again. A massive thanks to all three volunteers! I'm hoping that next year, Bert and Linda Yerke (who couldn't make it this year) are able to join again, we can have a real KDE party then! Especially as the Yerkes created some great swag last year (the awesome Konqi stickers!) and I have high expectations for what they might bring in 2017.

In any case, with these volunteers, the booth was staffed and lots of people could get their questions answered and had a place to leave their praise and thanks.


GNOME and KDE - brothers in arms!


Scarlett took a pic with me ;-)

Others

Of course, there was also the GNOME booth, well staffed and with demo devices. Walking over the rest of the exhibition hall, I spotted other distro's and projects. Elementary looked nice (their icons seem their biggest asset, seeing how they were promoted) and I talked to people at the Ubuntu booth. Their booth had a big Dell banner and two Dell employees to talk to about the Dell Developer Edition laptops. A great project and the team is doing an amazing job! Soon, the new Dell XPS devices will become available through the program and I'm thinking about getting one.

I must admit, though, that after putting the Dell XPS 13 next to my own Samsung np900x3c, the Samsung still feels sleeker, thinner, lighter, more durable. Sadly, the Samsung was a bit ahead of its time and battery life is a serious weakness. I take battery life over performance and big screens any time (not over ram, though, I want 16GB to stop running out of ram). So I'm hoping for a premium, Core M based (passively cooled) laptop from Dell, WITH Ubuntu on it. One can dream, right?


SCALE is tiring or relaxed, you pick.


Swapnil interviewing Elementary!

Besides the booths, there were also talks and lunches and dinners and conversations with loads of people


HP had only a magician at their booth. Fun, yes. But I prefer the real stuff ;-)

I'll next do an ownCloud-at-SCALE14x blog, but separate as that's where I spend most of my time and I thus have a lot to write about it!

We're coming to FOSDEM and SCALE!

The conference season 2016 is coming. ownCloud will be running booths at the largest events in EU and the USA: SCALE 14x in LA and FOSDEM 2016 in Brussels!

  

SCALE 14x

The 14th SCALE moves to a new location in Pasadena, promising to be bigger and better than ever. I'm hoping the much greater distance from the LA Airport will be worth it, but I'm not taking a chance: I want to be there. Like last year, Matt McGraw has committed to helping out, Frank can unfortunately not make it. We could thus certainly use a third helper at our booth!

As Matt can attest, it is not difficult - and certainly a lot of fun to tell people about the awesome that is ownCloud and help them if they have questions. You don't need to know ownCloud inside out to be able to help, many questions are repeat questions you'll quickly learn to answer and at least half the time you're just there to pitch ownCloud or hear how much people love it.

If you're up for it, let me know!

I'll be giving two talks, one about ownCloud on embedded devices like Pi's and one in which I attest you're not as clever as you think.


Timelapse video from the booth last year ;-)

ownCloud booth between Diaspora and Tor

FOSDEM

Last year, we had a real good time at FOSDEM. We were sandwiched between Tor and Diaspora, a great spot to be in - privacy corner, so to say. We had massive numbers of people come by, ask questions, give comments - it was real great to talk to so many people.

This year, I'm counting on the same busy time. We've got a booth again, don't know where it is yet but we'll have a team to answer any questions you might have. As always, if you're up for helping out, let me know!

ownCloud Server 8.2 is here

And on time following the new three month release cycle! The previous release, ownCloud Server 8.1, was all about stability, performance and security. Now, more work has been put in the user experience. That shows in the new sidebar, the new gallery app and refreshed style but for system admins, there's a large number of new control points as well.

Gallery app

For end users, the design improvements are nice but the new Gallery app is truly a transformation. It is essentially the 'Gallery Plus' app, developed by Olivier Paroz. It is essentially a full rewrite based on the new app framework, after which lots of features and performance improvements were made. The app has been around for a while and Olivier has solidly proven himself as maintainer so I'm really glad this app is now a part of the core ownCloud experience. Below is Oliviers' talk from the ownCloud Contributor Conference, introducing the new Gallery to the community!

Notifications

The new notifications are cool, too - only one app supports them, for now, and that one isn't there by default so you won't see notifications until apps get updated. But as soon as they get adapted to the new API, accepting share invitations or getting notified of changes becomes easier and nicer. If you want to play with the notifications right now, go get the announcementcenter app and send some news to your users to see how it works!

New Appliance and Proxy app

Technically not new, as both were announced at the conference and made available since then, but super awesome: we have an official ownCloud appliance. This will make installing ownCloud a lot easier for a lot of people - and bring back some kind of Windows Server support, too.

On top of that, the appliance contains the ownCloud Proxy app, which is really great for lowering the bar even further. Simply put, ownCloud Proxy enables you to take a laptop and an Internet connection, connect to your privately hosted ownCloud from anywhere, without requiring you to make any changes to your local network settings – no router configuration, no DNS entries, no domain name registration. The ownCloud Proxy service relies on a partner who provides the service for a fee. Right now, there is one partner, pageKite. It would rock if somebody else saw business in this, too, of course!

Now, go, go and get it. Note that the VM isn't available as of right now (14:05) because it's still building... An 8.1.3 based one is there, though.

Help ownCloud rock SCALE and FOSDEM in 2016!

FOSDEM and SCALE are respectively Europe and North America's biggest FOSS events and, of course, we'd love to run a booth there again. We had a good time last year, just check out see my overview blog and detailed blogs about FOSDEM and SCALE. It is time to start preparing again to have as much fun and impact as last year!

FOSDEM

For FOSDEM we will request a booth again and like last year I am sure it will be very well visited so we need help talking to the visitors!

My experience from last year was that many use ownCloud (and love it). These users often are interested in hearing and seeing what is coming, so I usually have a demo machine with me.

People new to ownCloud are almost invariably very interested and you can help them get started.

Note that you don't need any particularly deep insight in ownCloud to be able to help. For people new to ownCloud, a general overview of how it is for you as a user is already a huge help and we always have people around who can help with the harder questions.
 
Besides the booth, it'd be great if we get some talks in at various ownCloud-related devrooms, like the decentralization room and such. See some info on this page and stay tuned for the announcements of the devrooms.

  

SCALE

The 14th SCALE moves to a new location, promising to be bigger and better than ever. I sure want to be at that epic first in a new venue and so should you!

For SCALE, too, we'll try to get us a booth again and we do expect it to be very well visited just like last year. SCALE is a very cool event with many friendly folks. It surprised me how many people already knew about ownCloud but there were still hundreds we could delight with the knowledge a real free solution exists for their cloudy needs. We can really use some hands with this!

And like with FOSDEM - you don't need to be an ownCloud expert to be able to help out. Being able to explain the concept from the users' point of view is the most important thing!

I'll shoot in a talk or two but - if you have anything you'd like to talk about, SCALE, too, has a call for papers open.

For both events we have the ability to help you with travel and hotel costs if need be. Just contact me directly about that and we can figure things out!

ownCloud needs you!

Lightning Fast

For the last two years, we had only lightning talks & workshops at the ownCloud Contributor Conference. This is an exceptionally good model for creation-type events like ours and your event might benefit from it, too.

Why

To find the best way of presenting content to visitors you must define goals for an event. If your event focuses on creating, building, developing or making and collaboration between participants who might not know each other yet is important, a track of lightning talks is a great way to kick off.

What

Lightning talks are very short sessions (3-15 minutes, usually gravitating around 5 minutes) which are typically scheduled in a single track. This means that the entire audience of an event is in the room and explains why the talks have to be short. Even if some of the subjects aren't interesting for everybody, the next comes in just a few minutes.

These talks provide an opportunity for people to present what they work on and for the audience to find out what is going happening in the project. Perhaps more importantly, the audience can find out who to talk to - connecting names and faces to subjects.

Indeed, due to their nature, lightning talks do not go very deep. This is as much a strength as it is a weakness, though, as presenters are forced to get rid of most of the content so they focus on what matters most. Overhead like lengthy personal introductions, many examples or the setup of demos falls to the wayside and a single point emerges.

How

As the format is a little more unforgiving than 30 or 60 minute 'tech talks', it is a good idea to practice in advance. Luckily, the short duration means that rehearsing the talk 5 or 6 times isn't a big time drain.

For the organization of an event it is important to get the slides from the participants well in advance. This not only forces the participants to be prepared but, as there is no time to even switch presentation files, you can prepare them in a single go. I demand slides in PDF and concatenate them in a single file.

To keep the audience hooked, schedule the lightning talks with much variation. Vary technical subjects with process-oriented talks and social ones. Look for a light note occasionally and be sure not to push to many down the throat of the visitors without an occasional break. In that time, people can look up the presenters and dig a little deeper, process the inspiration and relate it to their own interests.

It also makes sense to have them in the morning and/or the first day, so they provide a starting point for, especially, new participants. They can set the tone, perhaps not like a keynote does, but more practical.

If you additionally need more in-depth sessions and technical talks, you can schedule them in parallel after the lightning talks. This also gives speakers in the lightning talks the opportunity to invite people to these sessions, giving participants some insight in what they will cover.

My personal todo for the next #ownCloudConf includes practicing all lightning talks with all speakers in a one-on-one video call, both to solidify the deadline and increase quality.

LAX, SCALE, KDE, SUSE, GNOME and ownCloud

Lobby of the venue

Back home. Tired and jetlaggy, but satisfied: SCALE rocked!

SCALE loves ownCloud

The 13th South California Linux Expo was awesome! It is the biggest LinuxFest in the USA. While decidedly different in nature from Europe's biggest Linux event that that took place just three weeks prior (FOSDEM), we met similarly enthusiastic existing and future users. Conversations were also similar: about half the visitors already knew ownCloud, often using it or planning on deploying it; and the other half was more than a little delighted to hear about it, often exclaiming they had been looking for 'something like that' for a while. Negativity was extremely rare: I don't recall a single negative comment at SCALE (merely a few people who liked ownCloud but had no use for it personally), FOSDEM had one conversation starting unpleasantly but quickly turning around - even though one feature of ownCloud wasn't up to snuff, the user was happy with the experience as a whole.

Before the action started!

For most users, ownCloud was simply a wonderful product and they used it at home, deployed it for customers or managed it in their company. Some asked what features were coming or just arrived in ownCloud 8, or asked about the state of specific features and in more than one occasion they very enthusiastically told me how excited they were about ownCloud, how they loved it and how they were telling everybody to use it!

ownCloud to-go

Those who didn't know ownCloud were almost invariably surprised and excited. I can't count the times I heard "wow, why did I never hear about this before" and "dude, I've been looking for something like this for ever!". Often, people wondered how long ownCloud had been around (we just turned five), if it was open source (yes, with love), how many people contributed to it (719 and counting) and how many users it has (we guestimate over 2 million, with 500,000 in this single deployment alone). Oh, and, does it scale? The deployment linked above and a mention of users like CERN can put most concerns to rest. Yes, ownCloud scales from Raspberry Pi to Atom Smashing size.

What came up a few times as barriers to their future usage of ownCloud was pretty much what I discussed before. Running a server at home is not easy and I walked by the EFF booth to ask about progress on Let's Encrypt to ask about the progress of solving one aspect of that problem: more easily getting SSL certificates. I was told the project is on track for the 2nd half of this year.

Frank and Bryan Lunduke

It is wonderful to have such energizing, positive, enthusiastic users - and to have such an enthusiastic booth crew to talk to them as well. At the booth we had Frank, Matt, Ron, Camila and myself. Awesome it was and we had great fun! Below a timelapse video of Saturday morning. It was still rather quiet but it is nice to see us jump around!

Stuff and talk

Just like at FOSDEM, we brought ownCloud stickers, hand outs explaining ownCloud to users and developers as well as some posters for the booth and pins to give out. This was all very much appreciated - I estimate we gave out about 400 hand outs and 500 or so stickers as well as about 50-100 pins.

Sunday at 3PM, I gave a talk about Privacy and ownCloud, with Frank finishing off with a section about his talk at MIT where he discussed ownCloud's Federated Cloud sharing feature and where it is going. The talk was well received; I think the angle I took to privacy (inspired by my background in psychology) spoke to the audience and Frank's description of federation and how it's done in ownCloud was very interesting. owncloud.org and owncloud.com will feature blogs with some more information about this soon.

Friends

Big, big booth!

I also walked by the booths of 'old friends' - the openSUSE/GNOME/KDE crew in particular, it was awesome to meet them. Some I hadn't seen in years, others I met for the first time. They did an amazing job and richly deserve the reward they earned for most Stunningly Amazing Booth Crew (don't know the real name of the booth award but that's what it should be). If you think that 'just' GNOME an KDE being incorporated in the openSUSE booth isn't enough - Master Planner of the Booths Drew aims to bring in Enlightenment and XFCE as well next year. Supposedly a Trello board has been set up already. I bet it won't be long before it has grown to the point where the SCALE organization needs to give the 'openSUSE booth & friends' a separate hall at SCALE...

I have to note that it was thanks to our green friends that I could hang up the ownCloud flyers - they lend me some (green!) tape to do that.

The KDE booth had a bunch of terribly cool stickers (I only now realize I forgot to get one for myself!) as well as the "frameworks 5" flyers. I could only bring, like, 5 t-shirts and a dozen old 'join-the-game' flyers so I'm glad Bert Yerke and his wife, who formed the awesome local KDE team, had created the other materials. We already discussed 2016, as they have plenty of ideas on how to improve the booth!

Awesome stickers...

If you, dear reader, want to help out at the KDE or ownCloud booth next year - let me know, either in the comments or by mail. I can promise you: it is awesomely fun and by far not as scary as you might think! Bert and Matt and everybody who has ever been at a KDE, openSUSE, ownCloud or other FOSS booth can attest to that: it is a great way of getting involved and making a big difference!

Bonus points for who finds a suitable meaning for the one item in the title which isn't yet an acrynym ;-)

Where is KDE 5 and when can I use it?

The vast majority of users, when talking about "using KDE", are talking about the desktop. Plasma, that is. So when you ask "when will KDE 5 be ready?", your answer will be that our brand new desktop is already at version 5.1 and making swift progress! Stability is quite good, but there's work to do in the feature area. Distributions don't ship it as default yet.

If you ask for 'official packages from my distribution', most distributions, including Fedora, openSUSE and Kubuntu, have had packages since 5.0. The just-released openSUSE 13.2 ships with Plasma 4.11 (the latest and last version in the stable 4 series) as default desktop but has Plasma 5.1 as option, next to GNOME Shell, XFCE and everything else. Kubuntu similarly released with Plasma 4.11 and a tech preview with Plasma 5.1 simultaneously. Both have KDE Applications 4.14.x, as there is no release of the Frameworks based apps yet. openSUSE offers a repo with newer apps but they're unstable as popcorn in an oven.

"when will this be default in distributions?" might be your next question. A good estimate is that by Plasma 5.4, to be released in the 2nd quarter next year, distributions will move over to the new series. Kubuntu has already announced they will ship Plasma as default desktop in 15.04 and I expect others with a similar or later release date to follow suit.

How ready is it?

While progress has been very fast and the team has been focusing on the end user experience, there still are glitches and missing features. Many of the supporting apps and widgets are still being ported or optimized for the new environment. Klipper has seen awesome work by Martin Graßlin with help from the new KDE design team, work on KMix is in progress and things like HiDPI support aren't entirely fleshed out yet either.

I'd recommend moving over your work desktop or laptop for 5.4. Until then, help test and improve it to make sure it is ready for you! Use the experimental packages for openSUSE or Kubuntu for testing, or build your own. This is a good time to get involved as there are plenty of relatively simple yet very impact-full tasks waiting for volunteers!

What is KDE 5 and why do you call it 'Plasma'?

To talk about something you have to define it, and I realize that that is a a bit more complicated than it used to be. In July I blogged about the disappearance of the 'software compilation'. That term was introduced after we re-branded KDE to no longer be the product we made, but the people who made it.

To understand the relation, compare KDE to another organization which creates (among other things) software: Microsoft. Like KDE, they create products and technologies like Office (KDE makes Calligra), Windows (KDE develops Plasma), .NET (KDE releases Frameworks), C# (KDE uses C++). Nobody confuses Microsoft Office with Microsoft 8.1 so this should be easy enough, I hope!

Why the change?

We used to release our desktop, applications and libraries at once, the KDE releases. Unfortunately that created two problems:

• It confused many users about what was needed to run KDE applications. Could you only run Amarok in KDE? Did you have to install all of KDE to use Krita? For advanced users, these are simple to answer, but on user forums they kept coming up and you'd hear users at conferences tell you they never tried Krita because they did not like KDE (meaning the desktop).
• The KDE 4.0 release had been a disaster in part because we released all its components at the same time, while not all were of the same quality. Many of the applications had been ported almost a year before and were quite mature, while especially Plasma, the desktop, had undergone a serious rewrite and simply wasn't ready.

To deal with these two issues, we changed the meaning of "KDE" to be the people in our community and started talking about the separate products as what we released. That was still all released at once, so most users continued to talk about KDE 4.x

Today things are different. While the libraries (KDE Frameworks) are currently at version 5.4 (released monthly), Plasma is at 5.2 (released every 3 months) and the KDE Applications are at 4.14. The latter will release soon with a date-based name, as it is build on a mix of the 4.x series and the 5.x series of our libraries so a common version number just doesn't work.

Here's a view of how it all fits together:

What goes with what?

You might ask next: "what version of what goes with what?" - a fair question. Luckily, the distributions will mostly deal with these dependency questions for you!

Still, if you want, here is an overview of how the relations currently are.

Frameworks releases monthly, combining bug fixes and (small) features. You can use the latest, stability is very important for the Frameworks team and it should be perfectly safe. Of course, this introduces a bit of an issue for distributions, which often don't want to mix feature- and bugfix releases. I'm not sure how they will deal with this. The backwards compatibility of Frameworks should allow updating them like bug fixes, but we'll have to see who does what.

Plasma releases every 3 months and usually depends on the latest or latest -1 version of Frameworks at release time. It will work just fine with versions newer than what it depends on as minimum.

Applications is still in the 4.x series, but many applications are already ported to Frameworks and the first release (14.12) will come next month. The numbering will be year.month, so if the next release comes 4 months later, it will be 15.4. They, too, will probably require latest or latest -1 version of Frameworks when released.

As of today, most distributions stick with the latest version of Plasma in the 4.x series (that is 4.11) and the latest version of KDELibs in the 4.x series, 4.14 (technically 4.9 but the numbers have been kept in line with Applications to keep things simpler).

Bringing it all together:

if you want a stable system, stay on Plasma 4.11 with KDELibs and Applications 4.14 for now. If you want to try out the new tech, try Plasma 5.2, which depends on Frameworks 5.3. With Applications 4.14 - no newer release is out yet, but openSUSE offers regular git checkouts and they have been working quite well for me personally. Find instructions here.

Note:
The 4.x series has already been split up. If you run "KDE 4.14", you don't. The last official Platform release is 4.9 and Plasma is at 4.11. Only the applications have continued to release, and speeding up their release cycle, while the Platform has seen increasing version numbers to keep packaging easy.

It all comes together: no more Software Compilation but more KDE!

KDE 4.0 demo in Dresden, 2007 (short hair time, yes)

With the KDE 4.0 release we had the issue that everything was one big blob: the libraries, the desktop and the applications, all inter-dependent.

Back then, at the end of 2007, the libraries and many of the applications were in a very good shape. Especially the KDE Edu applications I remember: they were stable, pretty and awesome for many months already before the release and their developers were itching to get their code to users. I had made a blog post with cool video's of KDE edu apps in October 2007. Here is Kalzium at that point:



Unfortunately, the desktop, having undergone a HUGE rewrite, was not at that same level of quality. As I wrote later that Month:

"When I show people the state of Plasma, they're like "hmm, that's not good". So I then proceed to show the Edu and Games, cheers them right up."

But the last release of KDE had been in 2005 (!!) and after more than two years, we really wanted the new and improved apps to get out to users. The desktop was basically workable so we decided to release. Code that is not in users hands rots away...

We all know how that went - distributions shipped it as default and the internet erupted with hate.

Doing better now

So, for the 5 series, we split it all up: Frameworks 5.0 (the new name of our modularized libraries) was released last week, the desktop came out yesterday and the Applications still mostly have to start moving to Qt5/Frameworks 5... We weren't forced to release half-baked stuff but everything came 'when done'.

KDE is now People. And dragons.

Better separation: rebranding

That was possible because we rebranded 'KDE' to mean community in November of 2009. This created (over time...) separate brands  for 'Plasma', 'Applications' and 'Platform' (now 'Frameworks') which could release on their own. Could being the operative term here, as we kept releasing it together.

That created quite some branding confusion, also because we had not thought through all the issues we would bump into. So when we finally decoupled releases at the release of Plasma 4.11 (the latest release in the 4.x series) and the KDE Platform at 4.9 (although that got some serious updates since then and has kept increasing version number for packaging convenience), it was largely ignored.

Which in turn created some confusion when Frameworks 5.0 came out - several people asked 'where can I get KDE 5', expecting to run the desktop and applications already. Well, I'm quite OK with users saying 'I use KDE' as long as they mean Plasma and realize there is more to KDE than the desktop. Because when I say I use Microsoft, I am not lying. I've always been a huge fan... of their keyboards. Not joking, their operating system wasn't great last time I used it but I love the 'comfort curve' series of keyboards. They should stick to hardware, clearly their strongest point.

In hindsight, we probably better would have waited until there was a real need for the rebranding - like today, or in 2013, when Plasma stopped releasing. Then again, we did expect that to come soon - there already had been talks about disconnecting the releases, it just didn't happen. Well, hindsight is always 20-20, they say...

And as the title points out - there is no more need for the 'Software Compilation' term, which was invented to solve the confusion of 'KDE releases three separate things but all at once'. We no longer release the Applications, Desktop and Libraries at once...

Better communication

Another thing we changed is our communication. In the KDE 4 times, what we did was PROMO: being as positive as one could be ;-)

Since then, we've learned a little actual marketing. Perception management and fancy stuff like that. Including properly explaining what something is and is not ready for! That's why I wrote a known issues section for the Beta of Plasma including:

"With a substantial new toolkit stack below come exciting new crashes and problems that need time to be shaken out."

With a clear section on where we stand in the final release announcement on the dot (See Suitability and Updates on the bottom of the article) we have made clear what the state is - and that we don't think distributions should ship Plasma 5.0 as default. And distributions have picked up on this - at least neither Kubuntu nor openSUSE will ship their upcoming release based on Plasma 5.0.

Forward

Now, the future. Plasma 5.0 is out, and on a 3-month release cycle. Frameworks comes with a new version every month, the Applications are still at 4.13 with a beta of 4.14 out last week. After 4.14 is out, the work on a Frameworks 5/Qt 5 port will commence full-steam but some applications will be ready before others. How will we deal with that conundrum? I don't know yet. There might be two KDE Application releases for a while, as some applications will take longer to get ported than others.

But we're better positioned than ever to bring innovations to the Linux Desktop. So let's see what the future brings!

(Ok, I do have SOME thoughts on where KDE, is going, see Part 1 and Part 2)

Awesome people!

You might have seen that KDE has a new Konqi drawing. Like our previous mascot, you don't see Konqi very often. That is not just because we don't love Konqi (at least, I do) but also because we don't have that many pretty pictures of Konqi.

For articles I'm always in a pickle when it comes to adding some images. I've been a bit creative myself but it often leads to things like this:

It is probably creative (if you get it, that is) but it is not very good. For an article about bug hunting I cut out the Konqi on the right out of the group pic. Yeah, also - it kind of works, but barely.

Then it hit me. Why not ask the artist who made these Konqi's to... make some more! I emailed Tyson Tan and he simply replied asking what and when.

And now: some awesome Konqi's are coming to the dot! Today, we released the first in a hopefully long line of articles with Awesome Konqi's. Check out our Frameworks konqi below:


As sebas said:

I'm actually quite impressed how well it depicts something as deeply technical and abstract as Frameworks 5.

Indeed. This makes me happy!

LinuxTag 2014 Fun

Thursday, Friday and Saturday last week, LinuxTag took place in Berlin. A few months ago, in a moment of temporary insanity, I had proposed to three projects to organize their booths: KDE, openSUSE and ownCloud. As that wasn't challenge enough, I wanted to experiment with doing workshops at the booth, specifically aimed at attracting and training potential new contributors.

How it came to be

Music outside!

I proceeded to register a booth, promising the LinuxTag exhibition manager (Elke Moritz), the KDE e.V. board, the openSUSE Board and my brand new boss at ownCloud that we would set up a great show. As I wouldn't be able to separate ownCloud (PHP) or KDE (C++, QML) code from text in a openSUSE .spec file nor can staff three booths at once, you can imagine I promised more than I could ever deliver on my own. But that's where friends come in, right?

And they came through - the result was great.

Re:Publica area

The new LinuxTag

First, a short introduction. LinuxTag is one of the oldest European Linux events, operating under the credo: "bringing .org and .com together". That is, they feature both commercial and community booths and a big selection of talks.

LinuxTag has been taking place at the Messe in Berlin in the last years, and this has not been a hugely successful location. But this year, there was change: a co-location with the immensely popular Re:Publica event as well as collaboration with DroidCon was meant to bring a lot of new energy. The new location, Station Berlin, gives a more fitting Linux feeling: much more raw. If you ask me, it worked out, LinuxTag was a much better event than it has ever been in the Messe.

What did we do

openSUSE, ownCloud and KDE

As I noted, our plan was two-fold. We, that is KDE, openSUSE and ownCloud, would have a combined booth. We would use the combined space not for a traditional table+swag, instead set up an area for workshops. In short, 1 hour slots, visitors would learn the basics of working within each of the three communities. For example:

• writing ownCloud apps
• developing KDE applications
• packaging for openSUSE.

We wouldn't plan for a big audience: the workshops would go deep and be personal.

Daniel giving a workshop

So, we got together speakers and defined a program (see my blog). I received the ownCloud and openSUSE booth materials home and the day before LinuxTag, drove it all to the venue, picking up KDE stuff from Lydia Pintscher at the wikimedia office later in the evening. Due to some snafu's with the booth area preparations we had to set up the booth in the morning - which happened even before Danimo and myself arrived with some more materials (thanks booth team!).

The booths

Our booth area (all the way to the left!)

We planned for little space (essentially one combined booth) but the LT team had given us so much space, we had to set up three big booths! openSUSE got the big table, ownCloud took two round ones and a third round table was covered in the KDE tablecloth, with a huge KDE flag hung up next to it. Behind it all 12 chairs and a table with a projector. All this was quite a bit more than we planned, so the initial idea (we'd only need 1-2 people at a time to do 'booth duty' for the 3-in-1 booth) didn't work out very well: all three booths had to be staffed most of the time. We did have some overlap at quiet times, but full house during especially the breaks.

I had printed posters with the schedule, one for each day as we had slight schedule changes every day. We hung them up all over the place, after which we put down openSUSE, ownCloud and KDE flyers wherever there was space. The openSUSE Beer coasters did particularly well - we had put them on the tables in the eating/drinking area and we had to 'refill' several times a day.

Us vs them?

The posters and most of the flyers I had created for ownCloud pointed people to the booth (I stole the concept of the 'consume vs create' poster from the openSUSE Conference in Dubrovnik, btw!). We should have asked people how they found out about the workshops, from posters, blog, workshop or being told at our booth. I have no idea how effective each of those is...

Let me now point to this blog by Danimo about the owncloud presence, the KDE blog by Sebastian is out too. And I expect the openSUSE team to publish their blog(s) very soon.

Booth fun

Give some balloons to Frank, and...

For me, there was some fun synergy: meeting KDE-on-openSUSE users interested in installing ownCloud. Or, after starting a conversation with somebody about one of these projects, continuing the conversation about one of the others. Several times, I got users interested in all three at once: Server Linux (openSUSE/ownCloud) and Desktop Linux (openSUSE/KDE).

I also noticed that many visitors already knew ownCloud, or had at least heard of it. At some point, I was talking to a visitor, explaining ownCloud, while a second visitor joined the conversation. He already knew about ownCloud and took over, while I talked to a third visitor, answering some questions. Then a fourth showed up, who begun answering their questions while I turned to a fifth, explaining ownCloud... Great to get in conversations like that!

During a quiet moment, a visitor came to me, complaining he had been 'in line' to talk to me several times, but it was so busy, he didn't get a chance before! Indeed, we had busy times, especially Thursday. But that's awesome, right?

I also gave two talks - one at the evening program of LinuxTag about where the Linux Desktop is going (it didn't go very well, I'm afraid) and one about Community Governance at the first European Community Leadership Summit, that did go quite well. Shame I couldn't stay too long for the CLS as we had friends over and I had to go home...

All in all, for me, it was a great event.

Re:Publica Hippies

The team

Let me also not forget to introduce the team at LinuxTag to you:

• Daniel Molkentin (ownCloud)
• Arthur Schiwon (ownCloud)
• Georg Ehrke (ownCloud)
• Frank Karlitschek (ownCloud)
• Sebastian Gottfried (KDE)
• Christian Boltz (openSUSE & PostfixAdmin)
• Bernhard Wiedemann (openSUSE)
• Marcel Külhorn (openSUSE)

We had several people come by and help out a bit, as well as three others giving booth workshops:

• Maik Aussendorf (Bareos)
• Gratien D'haese (REAR)
• Jörg Schilling (fraunhofer, cdrecord)

Sebastian's KDE workshop

The workshops

During the booth work, we had the workshops going on. It had a bit of a slow start on Thursday morning, but quickly, the workshops started to attract some more people. At one point did I see Sebastian surrounded by six visitors interested in KDE development... I think, on average, the workshops attracted about 3-6 visitors each. Which is quite good, considering they were primarily aimed at introducing people to contributing to our projects.

Despite the amount of work preparing the booth workshops, I'd do it again. Imagine if only a third of the visitors decides to join the respective communities!

openSUSE booth team in action

Feedback

If you visited one of these booth workshops or our booth at LinuxTag, I'd love your feedback! Knowing how we did, if we were friendly, fun, interesting, or what was missing and what you'd like to see next time - it all helps us improve in the future!

In any case, everybody who contributed to the booths and presentations as well as everybody who visited us: thank you very much!

Of course very special hugs to the booth- and presentation team.

Meta Blogging

Today, I blog about blogging. My goal is to convince you, hard working contributor to KDE, ownCloud or openSUSE, that you should regularly blog about the awesome you do.

Blogging is great

Contributors blogging about what they do is awesome, really. This way, we:

• Share knowledge so others don't have to re-invent the wheel
• Share ideas so others know what we're up to and can help improve plans
• Get help so readers might feel compelled to help out!
• Give help so using ownCloud/KDE/openSUSE/etc becomes easier for people
• Increase our visibility so users/developers know who to beat up talk to
• Create some noise for the outside forums, news sites, magazines etc - press in general

And that's all absolutely awesome. I even bet there are at least 3 more reasons why blogging is good for your community and I hereby offer cookies for whoever shares three other reasons in the comments section.

But let's be honest. Who cares about how it benefits whatever? It's the age of me me and more me!

But what really matters...

So I want to make clear that YOU benefit. Taking time off to write down what you're working on, putting ideas in order—this is incredibly useful. You will not only become a better writer but also a better thinker. Better at expressing your ideas but also better at putting them in order, examining them, refining them.

Blogging makes you stop and think about what you are doing. You take a little time to dive a bit deeper in what drives you, why you work on what you work on and how you can do better.

This should make clear that the idea of "I have nothing to say" makes no sense. If you are doing things, you must be thinking about them. Blogging is just thinking out loud. Which helps YOU think and, as I pointed out above, helps others see what you think about and give you input.

HOW to do it then?

I'm not going to say writing is simple. If you look up the first posts on my blog, well, let's just say it didn't come by itself for me either. You might be looking at a blank page for a while. But it gets easy when you have something to say! If you're enthusiastic about something or pondering a complicated problem, that is the moment to start. Open your favorite text editor and just blurt down your thoughts, why you're happy/angry/enthusiastic/etc.

Then structure it a bit, try to explain the things. You might have learned this in the past already: explaining something complicated to somebody else is awesome, because you learn from doing that yourself. Maybe even more than the person you're explaining to!
Then make it more presentable. Add a few headers above big paragraphs to break it up, maybe add a picture. Flickr is a great source of pics and it makes your blog a bit lighter, but it is not mandatory at all. Then just publish. Because, really, you can polish forever but it will never be perfect. And you learn while writing. So write, publish, and write some more!

On the idea of "you must do regular writing": a myth. Yes, writing about what you did last week is helpful. It gives a base to start with, keeps your life organized. But it is not The Only Way To Success when it comes to blogging. You need a bit of inspiration. I've gone months without blogs, and had weeks with several. That might not be awesome from a 'social media' perspective but really, who gives a rats' ass about that? I know I don't.

Write when you are thinking about something, when you're inspired. That's enough.

Conclusion

Blogging is helpful. Most people don't feel compelled to share their expertise, knowledge and ideas. That is OK, of course - but if you are willing to blog, please do it! It isn't as hard as it sometimes feels and it is more helpful for yourself than you might think.

And if your project has a blog roll like planet KDE, planet openSUSE and ownCloud News, get your blog on there! More readers = more comments = more motivation and more value for you. Really!

For the ownCloud folk: contact me if you want your blog on our blog roll. I'd be happy to add it!

oSC14 and LinuxTag coming!

It's becoming conference season again... Tomorrow morning I'll fly to Dubrovnik for the openSUSE Conference. I give no less than 5 talks and one workshop. Don't worry, I'm not DDOSing the event, the talks are restricted to 30 minutes (even though I have about 1 hour of content for each, let's see how that goes). My sessions:

• Social skills for geeks
• Presenting awesome (workshop about giving presentations)
• How to run a booth and present your project
• Where KDE is and where it is going
• Cloudy experiences at home (about ownCloud!)
• Community building in 10 steps

That's quite a bunch, I know, but it'll be fun! I look forward to Dubrovnik, although I see it will be rainy and not that warm. Ah, sad...

LinuxTag 2014 - all change

A much bigger deal, for me, is LinuxTag. This year, it is considerably different from the previous few years: no more in the Messe! Instead, the team is collaborating with DroidCon and Re:Publica. That, combined with the location (Station in Berlin), could potentially be awesome! Here I give one talk about the future of KDE. I'll also be speaking at the Community Leadership Summit Europe about Open Governance.

But more importantly, I'll be organizing the LT booth for three projects: ownCloud, KDE and openSUSE. Yeah, ambitious again! Not only that, we're not going for the traditional booth. Instead, I've proposed to do something different: have a track of technical mini-workshops at the booth. 45 minute talks, small, hands-on, about the technology of these projects. So, think about building packages with the Open Build Service, writing an ownCloud App or developing a QML based Plasma widget.

Needing some help

The idea seems generally liked but I haven't found anybody for any of the three above potential talks - so if you can and want to do that or something like it, please let me know! We won't have too much traditional booth space, just enough for a bit of stuff and one or two ppl answering questions. The talks will repeat every day so as volunteer, you give your talk 3 times, once every day. Otherwise you are free to enjoy the talks as well as the Re:Publica booth area. As the tickets are not cheap (Eur 149!) this is a nice way to get into LinuxTag for free (I have only 2 tickets per booth, though). You'll get hugs and Club Mate as much as you want. And there's travel support available for all these projects!

Help me out, please! And if you can't - at least, be sure to visit the booth at LinuxTag or come say hi at the openSUSE Conference!

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.

Summit, Con, Release...

The last weeks before my holiday have been quite crazy for me. SUSECon, openSUSE Summit and of course the openSUSE 13.1 release. Meanwhile, the openSUSE Board Elections have started... I decided to really try and stay away from things for two weeks. I'm not particularly good at that and I did a few thingies but I managed not too shoddy. Saw a museum, did pick up running again, watched some movies...

Now, back to SUSECon, the Summit and the release!

SUSECon,oS Summit

First things first, SUSECon and the openSUSE Summit were awesome. It is always wonderful how much energy these events give - so many enthusiastic people, ideas, plans...



On the press side during SUSECon, I kept myself busy with talking to 7 of the journalists, doing and arranging interviews or finding answers to their questions about openSUSE. And with Robert Schweikert I presented a session (twice) about the collaboration between SUSE and openSUSE. ITWire reported on this talk. We ran a booth at SUSECon as well and it was, as always, great to talk to people there.

On Wednesday was a Pirate Party, Thursday a visit to the Epcot park. I'm not a huge fan of such parks but it was entertaining enough to get food there... And I had great company!



At the Summit I presented two sessions, one about handling a booth and one about building local communities. In both cases, there was a lot of awesome feedback from the room and at the Orlando airport and further during the trip back I worked the suggestions in the presentations for further sharing. Thanks! I also really appreciated the private conversations about these topics which took place later on.



But the most important thing, for me, was meeting old friends again. Andi, Drew, the openSUSE Forms guys, the Greek delegation and many more. And bumping into new people like Navid and Christopher, two guys who run a media production company and want to help out openSUSE with web things. That's where the inspiring conversations happen. There were discussions about how to proceed with the Summit, how to handle community building in the Americas but also the great town hall meeting where I presented the 'Karmafication' idea for our infrastructure. This is something I might blog about later.

After the openSUSE Summit was over, Alex, Stella, Ludwig and myself went for a beach trip, video below. It was fun - although we drove an order of magnitude longer than that we actually spend on the beach ;-)

The release

Then the release, on the day I landed back from the US of A (and yes, they lost my luggage, luckily it is back). I think it went great, and seeing the response from the press I think others agree.

Now, we're debating changes to our development process on the mailing lists. Let's see how that goes!